ICE: The History, the Power, and the Path to Abolishing it Once and for All

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part 1. The Long Arc of U.S. Expansionism and the Racial Imagination of Empire
Part 2. Racial Ideology, Slavery, and the Invention of “The Mexican”
Part 3. Border Creation, Land Theft, and the Political Engineering of Migration Routes
Part 4. The Bracero Program and the Construction of a Dependent, Exploitable Labor Caste
Part 5. Operation Wetback and the Criminalization of Migration
Part 6. NAFTA, Corporate Domination, and Forced Migration
Part 7. U.S. Militarization of Mexico, State Violence, and the Drug War
Part 8. The Creation of ICE: A Post-9/11 Institution Built on a Century of Racial Control
Part 9. The Moral and Political Indictment of ICE
Part 10. A Leftist Strategy: How Organizers Can Fight and Weaken ICE

INTRODUCTION

Every nation constructs stories to explain its power, but few nations have constructed stories as contradictory and enduring as those the United States tells about its border. The country that proudly frames itself as a refuge for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses simultaneously builds one of the most violent, secretive, and militarized migration enforcement regimes on Earth. This contradiction did not arise from confusion or accident. It arose from history: a legacy of conquest, racial hierarchy, economic extraction, and imperial ambition that has manufactured the movement of people across the North American continent for centuries.

Although this essay focuses on Mexico and the U.S. Mexico border, it is essential to understand that Mexico is only the most concentrated example of a global pattern. The United States has engineered forced migration across entire regions and then punished the survivors for moving along paths shaped by U.S. policy. In Central America, Washington funded coups, death squads, and counterinsurgency campaigns that displaced millions from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In the Caribbean, U.S. occupations and interventions in Haiti created the very communities of people in boats that later faced criminalization. Across South America, U.S.-backed dictatorships under Operation Condor produced generations of exiles. In Southeast Asia, U.S. wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos created the refugee camps that later became symbols of American benevolence, even as the original destruction was actively concealed. In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and U.S. support for Israeli occupation in Palestine, produced long-term diasporas met with suspicion and surveillance. In North Africa and the Horn of Africa, U.S. military partnerships and drone campaigns deepened instability in Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, forcing civilians to flee while Western countries treated them as threats rather than victims. Everywhere the story is the same: the U.S. destabilizes, arms, and reshapes foreign societies, then criminalizes the human beings who move in response to the chaos it helped create. Mexico is not an exception. It is simply the border where this logic is most visible.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not emerge in a vacuum in 2003. It is the modern expression of much older logics of control. Its lineage stretches through the deportation campaigns of the twentieth century, through the Bracero Program that disciplined Mexican labor, through the border militarization that followed NAFTA, and through a foreign policy that destabilized entire regions and then punished the survivors for crossing the lines the U.S. itself drew. ICE is the inheritor of this lineage. It enforces the consequences of decisions it did not make but fully depends on: economic devastation in Mexico and Central America, weapons trafficking from the U.S. into cartel networks, the militarization of the Mexican state through Pentagon funding, the environmental collapse accelerating in rural regions, and the destruction of local economies through trade agreements that privilege corporate power over human life.

This essay argues that ICE is not only inhumane. It is structurally inconsistent with democracy, incompatible with human rights, and unnecessary for public safety. And because it is unnecessary, it is abolishable. But abolition requires more than outrage. It requires strategy. It requires an understanding of how the U.S. produced the conditions that drive migration, how ICE embeds itself into local institutions, and how ordinary people can dismantle those networks through coordinated, multi-level action.

The first half of this essay traces the long historical arc: from U.S. settler colonial expansion into Mexican territory to the racist ideologies promoted by national icons, from the Bracero Program to mass deportation campaigns, from NAFTA to modern corporate extraction, from U.S. weapons flooding into Mexico to the drug war that strengthens cartels rather than dismantling them. It locates these histories inside a broader imperial framework in which the U.S. has driven displacement across Central America, the Caribbean, South America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. The second half lays out a detailed strategic plan at the city, state, and federal levels for dismantling ICE’s infrastructure. This is not a wishlist. It is a roadmap. It explains how organizers map ICE’s presence, extinguish its operations, pass binding sanctuary laws, defund its capabilities, shut down its detention centers, and build a national framework that replaces punishment with support, and borders with responsibility.

Abolition is not a fantasy. It is a practice. And like every practice of justice in American history, it begins with a refusal: a refusal to believe that cruelty is inevitable, or that borders justify violence, or that the architecture of exclusion that built ICE is beyond the reach of ordinary people. What follows is both an indictment and an instruction manual. It invites the reader to see what the U.S. has done, what it continues to do, and what it must finally become if it wishes to take responsibility for its own history.

PART 1. THE LONG ARC OF U.S. EXPANSIONISM AND THE RACIAL IMAGINATION OF EMPIRE

The border did not fall from the sky. It was constructed, carved, and imposed with the cold logic of empire, a logic that begins long before any institution named ICE existed. To understand the violence of deportation today, to understand the cages, the raids, the separation of families, and the bureaucratic cruelty dressed up as immmigration enforcement, one must return to the beginning. One must confront the foundational violence that shaped the United States, for these fascist institutions we see today are not accidents. They are descendants.

The early U.S. fashioned itself as an experiment in freedom while expanding through conquest. This contradiction was not a glitch in the system. It was the system. Empire and liberty grew together, feeding off each other, each made possible by the other. The young republic was restless and hungry. Its political leaders believed that the entire continent was their inheritance, that the land of Indigenous nations and the northern territories of Mexico were waiting to be swallowed. Behind their speeches about democracy stood an unquestioned belief in white entitlement to land, resources, and dominance. When they looked west and south, they saw land that belonged to them, even before they possessed it.

The racism that guided this expansion was not subtle. Influential American writers and public intellectuals of the nineteenth century openly described Mexicans as inferior and unworthy of sovereignty. Such language was not rhetorical flourish. It was the ideological fuel required to justify taking half a country. The U.S. cultivated a sense of destiny that reduced entire populations to obstacles. Once a people are imagined as obstacles, anything done to them becomes permissible.

It is important to understand that Mexico was not a weak or marginal society waiting to be conquered. It was a nation struggling to stabilize itself after its independence from Spain, but it was also a nation with institutions, culture, and land that had belonged to Indigenous civilizations for thousands of years. The U.S. knew this. It simply did not care. Expansion was seen as natural law. Possession was framed as improvement. Theft was renamed progress.

The war against Mexico from 1846 to 1848 was the clearest expression of this mindset. Political leaders, namely President James K. Polk and the expansionist Democrats, provoked a conflict and then portrayed Mexico as the aggressor. It was a textbook imperial maneuver: start the fire, blame the victim, then claim victory as destiny fulfilled. By the end of the war, the U.S. had seized what is now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and parts of Wyoming. Nearly half of Mexico had been taken in the name of national greatness.

Many Americans today are taught that the border is some ancient or natural line, but it is not. It is the product of war. It is a scar cut into the continent. It shifted south not because of negotiation among equals, but because one country had the power to seize and the other lacked the ability to resist. It was a living example of Thucydides’s observation that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Settlers moved into these territories and began rewriting history to suggest that this land had always belonged to the U.S.. This rewriting was not mere denial. It was a strategy of erasure that laid the groundwork for criminalizing future generations of Mexicans who crossed the very border the U.S. had manufactured.

The newly drawn border was never intended to be humane. It was created to legitimize conquest. From its first moment, it functioned as a device that divided indigenous communities, disrupted migration routes that had existed for centuries, and transformed movement into trespass. Entire families who had lived on the land long before the U.S. existed suddenly found themselves labeled foreigners on their own soil. This is the original sin of the border. Every modern act of policing, every detention, every deportation, every raid is built on this original act of theft and the racist assumptions that justified it.

The U.S. expanded not because it was destined to, but because it believed it had the right to dominate. The political class nurtured a worldview in which white Americans were the chosen stewards of the continent. President James K. Polk told Congress that Mexico was “in a constant state of revolution” and incapable of maintaining stable government. Senator Thomas Hart Benton described Mexicans as “a wretched and degraded people,” and Representative Robert Winthrop argued that “our destiny is onward and it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Racial theorists reinforced this hierarchy. Josiah Nott claimed that “the Mexicans… are incapable of maintaining a free government,” and Samuel Morton wrote that Indigenous peoples possessed an “inferior organization” that confined them to a “narrow circle of thought.” These ideas survived well beyond the era of conquest. In the 1920s, Congressman John C. Box insisted that “every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased, and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border.” Court decisions had already entrenched this logic. Johnson v. McIntosh held that Indigenous nations possessed only a right of occupancy and no full title to their own homelands. Taken together, these doctrines asserted that Mexicans were unfit for self-government, that Indigenous peoples were obstacles to civilization, and that white settlement inherently improved whatever territory it claimed. This worldview was not fringe. It shaped presidents, lawmakers, churches, universities, and the nation’s most powerful institutions.

To understand ICE, one must understand that this ideology never died. It simply changed its vocabulary. The language of racial inferiority morphed into the language of security. The belief in white entitlement to land transformed into the belief that the U.S. must police movement across borders it created. The same logic that justified conquest now justifies deportation. The same assumptions that painted Mexicans as inferior now paint migrants as threats. History does not repeat in identical forms, but it echoes. It carries its past into the present.

The border, in other words, is not a geographical fact. It is a political weapon. It was born out of conquest and racial ideology, and it continues to function through those logics today. When ICE agents storm homes at dawn, when asylum seekers are detained, and when mothers are abducted away from their children, they are not acting in a vacuum. They are carrying out the same project the U.S. committed to in the nineteenth century: controlling who belongs and who does not, controlling who may move and who must be contained, controlling whose humanity is recognized and whose can be dismissed.

This is the beginning of the story. Without it, nothing about modern immigration policy makes sense. With it, everything becomes clear.

PART 2. RACIAL IDEOLOGY, SLAVERY, AND THE INVENTION OF “THE MEXICAN” AS A RACIAL CATEGORY IN THE AMERICAN ORDER

The U.S. has never simply managed immigration. It has managed people. It has sorted human beings into categories that serve the interests of power, and that sorting began long before the first immigration laws were written. To understand how the modern state views Mexican migration, one must understand how the category of “Mexican” was invented in the racial imagination of the United States. It was not an organic category. It was manufactured to justify domination.

The U.S. was built on a racial caste system rooted in the enslavement of Africans and the dispossession of Indigenous nations. These were not parallel histories. They were interlocking. The country learned to see human beings as exploitable bodies. It learned to assign value to people according to their usefulness to the economy. It learned to criminalize the existence of those who did not fit the racial hierarchy it had created. When the U.S. later looked at Mexico, it applied the same logic.

In the early 19th century, American racial ideology was obsessed with categories: white, Black, enslaved, free, civilized, savage. These categories were used to decide who could own property, who could testify in court, who could vote, who could marry, who could be enslaved, who could be conquered. The conquest of Mexican territory pressed the U.S. to answer a new question: 'What racial category would Mexicans inhabit under American rule?'

Mexicans were neither enslaved Africans nor Indigenous nations, at least not in the simplified American framework. They were a mixture of Indigenous, Spanish, and African lineages, shaped by centuries of colonization. They did not fit neatly into the binary racial system the U.S. relied on to maintain its social order. In response, the U.S. did something politically convenient. It constructed Mexicans as a racialized population that could be subordinated without being enslaved, exploited without being admitted into the polity as equals, and displaced without being given the legal protections that came with whiteness.

This was the birth of “the Mexican” as a racial category in the American order. It was a category of near-whiteness when labor was needed and foreignness when exclusion was needed. It was a flexible category created to maintain white supremacy even as the nation expanded into territories populated by people who could not be made white by law.

The U.S. annexed (took control of) territories such as New Mexico, Alta California, and Texas, home to tens of thousands of Mexican citizens who had built towns, ranches, churches, and political institutions long before the American conquest. After the war, American officials portrayed these communities as populations that needed to be subdued, monitored, and reshaped to fit U.S. racial and political hierarchies. Politicians claimed that Mexicans were unfit for republican government, weak in “industry and enterprise,” and incapable of sustaining modern institutions. This rhetoric was not a misunderstanding or a cultural judgment. It was a tool of domination that framed long-established Mexican communities as obstacles to American expansion and treated their survival, rights, and land as matters the U.S. could disregard in the name of national ambition.

The racialization of Mexicans in the U.S. cannot be separated from the institution of slavery. Slavery created a caste system that normalized the idea that humans could be sorted into categories of belonging and exclusion. The conquest of Mexican territory expanded this logic. The U.S. learned to manage multiple racialized populations simultaneously. Mexicans became a group that could be exploited for labor while being denied full membership in society. They became a population that could be invited in when needed and expelled when convenient. This pattern would repeat for the next two centuries.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when American agriculture and railroad companies needed labor, Mexicans were framed as hardworking, family-oriented, and compatible with American values. They were described as people whose culture made them ideal for grueling labor under harsh conditions. They were painted as docile but industrious, inferior but useful. These stereotypes were not compliments. They were the racial foundation of a labor caste system that allowed the U.S. to build vast industries while avoiding responsibilities to the workers who sustained those industries.

When the U.S. needed cheap labor, Mexican workers were welcomed into fields, railroads, and mines, especially during World War I and the agricultural expansion of the 1920s. But when the Great Depression hit and U.S. unemployment skyrocketed, the same Mexican workers were recast as threats. Politicians and newspapers claimed that people of Mexican descent were taking jobs, draining relief funds, and burdening local welfare systems. County officials, police departments, and federal agents coordinated mass raids and “repatriation” drives that pushed between several hundred thousand and nearly 2-million people to Mexico, including an estimated 1/3rd to 1/2 who were U.S.-born children. Local governments cut off relief to Mexican families, used public health inspections to label communities as unsanitary, and treated poverty itself as grounds for expulsion. The category of “Mexican” expanded during periods of labor demand and contracted during economic fear. It functioned not as a stable identity, but as a flexible tool that allowed the state to recruit workers when profitable and dispose of them once they were no longer needed.

It is essential to understand that the U.S. never simply found Mexicans crossing the border. It created the conditions that forced migration. It cultivated industries that depended on Mexican labor. It shaped racial ideology to justify exploitation. And it built legal structures to keep Mexican workers permanently vulnerable. The creation of “illegal immigration” as a category was the final step in this process, not the first.

American conquest of northern Mexico was never framed by U.S. leaders as aggression. It was framed as fulfillment. The political class of the mid-19th century embraced an ideology called Manifest Destiny, a white-settler doctrine that portrayed Anglo-American expansion as both inevitable and divinely sanctioned. In this worldview, Mexico was imagined not as a sovereign nation, but as a failed civilization occupying land it could not properly govern. Newspapers, politicians, clergy, and cultural figures insisted that U.S. domination of the continent was an act of progress, and that Mexicans and Indigenous peoples lacked the racial capacity for self-rule. This ideology converted violence into virtue and recast territorial theft as the natural unfolding of history.

Even America's most celebrated cultural icons reinforced this logic. Walt Whitman, frequently remembered as a democratic poet, argued openly that the Anglo-American race was destined to absorb Mexico and reshape the hemisphere. He described Mexicans in explicitly racialized terms and insisted that U.S. expansion would uplift a supposedly inferior population. His writing reveals how deeply conquest ideology permeated American culture: not confined to politicians or generals, but woven into the moral imagination of the nation itself. For Whitman and his contemporaries, expansion was not a violation. It was a rite.

This ideological framework shaped how the U.S. conducted the war, justified occupation, and later interpreted the presence of Mexicans in annexed territory. People who had lived on the land for generations were suddenly reclassified as foreigners, their political rights eroded, their cultural existence pathologized. This is where the deeper logic of deportation begins. Long before the U.S. created formal immigration enforcement agencies, it created a worldview in which Mexicans were treated as perpetual outsiders on land that had once been theirs. Manifest Destiny laid the cultural foundation for the border regime that would later criminalize movement, militarize geography, and ultimately give rise to ICE.

By the early 20th century, the U.S. had already perfected the template: welcome Mexicans when needed, criminalize them when not, and maintain a racial hierarchy that kept their labor cheap and their political power negligible. When the federal government later built the Border Patrol, passed exclusionary laws, and eventually created ICE, it was not innovating. It was inheriting the architecture of an older system.

The category of “Mexican” in the American racial order is not about nationality. It is about caste. It is about a deliberately created population kept in a state of disposability. It is about ensuring that industries have labor without conceding rights. It is about maintaining control over people whose movement predates the border itself. These racial logics are the ancestors of modern immigration enforcement. They shape the violence of detention and deportation, the framing of migrants as criminals, the militarization of the border, and the everyday cruelty of ICE.

When the United States treats migrants as trespassers on stolen land, it is not merely enforcing law. It is reenacting a racial project that began with conquest. The categories have changed. The language has softened. But the violence remains.

PART 3. BORDER CREATION, LAND THEFT, AND THE POLITICAL ENGINEERING OF MIGRATION ROUTES

A border is not a line. It is a decision. It is a political technology created to transform land into property and people into trespassers. The U.S. border with Mexico is one of the clearest examples in human history of this transformation. It was drawn not to reflect natural divisions or cultural boundaries, but to secure conquest and reshape the continent according to the priorities of a rising empire.

When the U.S. seized nearly half of Mexico’s territory through the war of 1846 to 1848, it redrew the map and then rewrote the meaning of the land itself. Millions of Indigenous people had lived across that territory long before either nation existed. After the war, those communities found themselves trapped between two national projects they did not choose. The border that divided them was not drawn with their consent. It was drawn to legitimize conquest and reorganize continental power.

From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (the agreement that ended the U.S.-Mexico War and redrew the border) through the late 19th century, the new border was porous. It existed largely on paper rather than as an enforced barrier, and people moved freely across it because their lives depended on it. Ranchers drove cattle back and forth across grazing lands that had never been divided. Farmers crossed to reach water sources, mills, and local markets that predated the border. Families moved freely within kinship networks that spanned both sides. Indigenous nations such as the Tohono O’odham, Apache, and Kickapoo continued their traditional routes without interference because the U.S. had no immigration system capable of restricting them. Crossing was not treated as a crime; unauthorized entry would not be criminalized until 1929, and there was no real federal enforcement presence until the mounted border guards were created in 1904. For more than half a century, the border remained  open, a line on a map rather than a militarized frontier.

The U.S. did not immediately police this line because it did not yet see migration as a threat. In the decades following the war, the U.S. was focused on consolidating its new territories, dispossessing Indigenous nations, and expanding settler colonies across the West. As these projects unfolded, the presence of Mexicans in the newly conquered territories was treated as a temporary inconvenience. The assumption was that Anglo settlers would overwhelm the Mexican population and reshape the region in their image.

This assumption was not only wrong but deeply revealing. It showed that the U.S. viewed Mexicans as people whose presence mattered only as a demographic obstacle, not as members of a political community. Mexicans were allowed to remain in the conquered territories, but their citizenship was always conditional and their rights always vulnerable. Their land was often stolen through legal manipulation, fraud, or outright violence. Their political influence was suppressed. Their labor was exploited. Their communities were seen as remnants of an older world that would eventually disappear under the force of American settlement.

The border began to take on new meaning as American industries expanded. Railroads needed labor. Farms needed labor. Mines needed labor. Mexicans became indispensable workers for these industries, and so the U.S. engineered migration routes that would supply this labor without granting the workers full personhood. The new border became a gate that could be opened or closed according to economic needs.

During economic booms, the gate opened. Mexican workers were recruited, transported, housed, and paid wages far below those of white workers. During economic downturns, the gate slammed shut. Deportations surged. Entire communities were rounded up and expelled. The border became a mechanism for regulating the availability of a cheap labor force. It was a valve that could be adjusted according to the needs of capital.

This dynamic intensified during the early 20th century. American agriculture grew more industrialized and more dependent on seasonal labor. Growers lobbied for unrestricted migration from Mexico but opposed any policy that would grant Mexican workers rights or stability. They wanted labor without belonging, service without citizenship, and presence without power. The border was redesigned to enforce precisely this arrangement.

The first immigration laws enacted by the U.S. did not target Mexicans. They targeted Asians. The Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, followed by the Immigration Act of 1917 and the Asian Barred Zone, revealed the racial logic guiding immigration policy. The U.S. was concerned not with regulating movement, but with regulating racial composition. When Asian migration was restricted and European immigration slowed dramatically after the Immigration Act of 1924, American industries panicked. They needed another racialized labor force to fill the vacuum. Beginning in the early 20th century and accelerating during World War I and the 1920s agricultural boom, Mexican workers became that force, not by accident but by design.

The U.S. engineered a system in which Mexican labor was indispensable and Mexican people were treated as expendable. Beginning in the early 20th century, railroads, mining companies, and Southwestern agriculture recruited tens of thousands of Mexican workers during labor shortages created by World War I, the collapse of European immigration after the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, and the agricultural boom of the 1920s. Employers moved these workers across the border without documentation, sometimes transporting entire crews by train, while denying them citizenship, land ownership, and basic labor protections. Local sheriffs and federal agents used border checkpoints, vagrancy laws, and public health inspections to control their mobility. The border functioned not as a barrier but as a mechanism that allowed industries to bring in labor while preserving the legal power to remove workers at will. It was not a line but a labor-management institution.

This structure is the political origin of undocumented migration. It did not arise spontaneously. It was created by U.S. policy. When growers and industrialists demanded labor, federal officials relaxed inspections, Border Patrol agents ignored unauthorized crossings, and local governments issued temporary entry permits. When wages rose or worker organizing increased, the same government conducted mass deportation drives, including the 1930s repatriation campaigns that expelled between several hundred thousand and nearly 2 million people of Mexican descent, many of them U.S.-born. During the Bracero Program (1942-1964), the U.S. admitted hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers under contracts that were deliberately temporary and tightly controlled. The border hardened when workers asserted rights and softened when employers needed them. Migration patterns followed political decisions, not chance.

People did not become undocumented because they crossed incorrectly. They became undocumented because the U.S. designed a system that required Mexican labor while refusing to provide stable legal pathways to enter or remain. In 1924, Congress created the national-origin quota system, which assigned almost all immigration slots to northern and western Europeans (white people) and allocated zero quota visas to Mexico. In 1929, Congress added Section 1325 to criminalize unauthorized entry, creating a crime for which no legal alternative existed. For decades, Mexican migration remained functionally legal only when employers requested workers. In 1965, when Congress reorganized the quota system, it abolished the explicitly racial formulas for Europe but replaced them with a 20,000-per-country cap for every nation outside the Western Hemisphere and, soon after, a 120,000 hemispheric cap for Latin America as a whole. This was the first time the U.S. imposed strict numerical limits on legal immigration from Mexico. By then, American agriculture, construction, and service industries relied on hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers each year, far exceeding the number of visas made available. The law created a deliberate gap between economic demand and legal supply, ensuring that workers who were needed for harvests, railroads, and factories would be rendered deportable as soon as that need ended. Undocumented status was not a natural outcome of movement. It was a manufactured condition created to maintain a permanently exploitable labor force.

After the U.S. reshaped the border, it reshaped identity. People who had moved across the region for centuries suddenly found themselves transformed into foreigners on their own land. Movement became criminalized. Community ties became suspect. Everyday life became a calculation of risk. The border was no longer just a physical barrier. It became a psychological one, an economic one, a racial one.

The engineering of migration routes did not end with the 19th century. It intensified in the 20th century as the U.S. expanded its economic reach and political influence across the hemisphere. It intensified again in the 21st century through the militarization of the border and the emergence of agencies like ICE. But the logic remains the same. The border exists to manage labor, control movement, and enforce racial hierarchy.

The violence of ICE today is not the result of bureaucratic mismanagement. It is the continuation of a long project that began with conquest. It is rooted in a border that was created to secure land, regulate people, and preserve white supremacy. It is rooted in economic dependencies built over generations. It is rooted in a system that treats movement as a privilege rather than a human right.

To understand how the U.S. later built the Bracero Program, NAFTA, and the modern deportation machine, one must first understand this history. The border was not meant to be humane. It was meant to be useful. It has done precisely what it was built to do.

PART 4. THE BRACERO PROGRAM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A DEPENDENT, EXPLOITABLE LABOR CASTE

The Bracero Program is often remembered through photographs of men smiling beside trains, hands raised in farewell, ready to cross into the U.S. to do work that the nation claimed it could not survive without. But the smiling photographs are lies. They were propaganda designed to hide the truth that the Bracero Program was not a benevolent labor exchange. It was a system of engineered dependency, mass exploitation, state violence, and racialized control. It turned Mexican workers into a caste, one that American agriculture and industry could rely on while refusing to honor the workers’ humanity.

The program began in 1942 and lasted until 1964, but the logic behind it was centuries old. It belonged to the same lineage as the conquest of Mexican land, the racial classification of Mexicans as exploitable but not equal, and the American tendency to recruit labor while denying rights. In its scale and formalization, howevver, the Bracero Program marked a turning point. It took the informal exploitation of Mexican labor that had existed for decades and turned it into a national policy. It was state sanctioned vulnerability.

The official justification was that the U.S. needed workers during World War II. Many American men had gone to fight overseas, and farms insisted that crops would rot if Mexican labor was not imported. Growers were desperate for a workforce that could be controlled and paid the lowest possible wages. They wanted laborers who could be removed if they organized or demanded fair treatment. They wanted bodies without bargaining power.

The U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to create a formal worker program that promised fair wages, decent living conditions, food, and transportation. These promises were written on paper. They were almost never fulfilled. Instead, the U.S. built a labor pipeline that guaranteed something else: a steady supply of workers who lacked the legal, social, or political tools to resist exploitation.

From the moment braceros arrived, the conditions were brutal. Men were stripped, sprayed with toxic pesticides, inspected like livestock, and processed like objects. They were treated as if their human worth was irrelevant. They signed contracts they often could not read, were bused to farms that treated them like disposable machinery, and were housed in overcrowded, unsanitary camps. Their wages were frequently stolen. Their protections were ignored. Complaints were punished with immediate deportation.

The structure of the program ensured this outcome. Braceros were tied to a single employer. If a grower fired them, they lost not only their job but their right to stay in the country. This dependency made them entirely subject to the farmer’s will. Abuse was not an accident. Abuse was designed into the program. The employer controlled the worker’s labor, shelter, mobility, and status. The government enforced the employer’s power.

The U.S. claimed that the program was mutually beneficial, but the reality was clear. American growers gained an obedient labor force. The workers gained nothing but survival. They could not change jobs, could not organize, could not bargain, and could not protest without risking deportation. They worked in conditions that white American workers had long rejected. They were paid less, lived worse, and faced constant surveillance. The program created a racialized workforce whose exploitation was socially accepted and legally protected.

The program was also dishonest. Workers were promised that a portion of their wages would be withheld and deposited into savings accounts in Mexico. This was pitched as a benefit meant to help them build a stable life when they returned home. In reality, much of this money never reached them. Decades later, many braceros and their families were still fighting to recover the wages stolen under the program. Their labor was taken from them twice. First through the work itself. Then through the theft of what they had earned.

As a brief aside, a similar racialized labor order operates today in Dubai and across the United Arab Emirates under the kafala system. Employers control a migrant worker’s legal status, seize or hold passports, restrict job changes, and withhold wages or pay far less than promised. South Asian, African, and Southeast Asian workers bear the brunt of this system, facing exploitation precisely because the state classifies them as temporary and easily replaceable. Workers who protest, they risk detention or immediate deportation. The structure mirrors the Bracero Program in its core logic: both systems recruit foreign labor, strip workers of bargaining power, and create conditions where exploitation becomes the expectation rather than the exception.

The Bracero system reshaped American agriculture. The braceros’ presence created an economic structure that American growers refused to abandon even after the program ended. When the program was terminated in 1964 due to widespread reports of abuse, the U.S. did not reform its labor system. It did not create fair pathways for workers who had become foundational to the nation’s food supply. Instead, U.S. employers (farmers) continued to demand the same large seasonal workforce from Mexico, but Congress refused to authorize new visa programs or expand existing legal channels. Employers still recruited Mexican workers through informal networks, Border Patrol still tolerated unauthorized entry during peak harvest seasons, and the agricultural economy still depended on tens of thousands of laborers each year. The U.S. kept the labor demand intact while eliminating the legal means to meet it. This transition gave birth to the modern era of so-called undocumented migration.

The end of the Bracero Program did not end reliance on Mexican labor. It only removed the legal framework that had allowed exploitation to operate openly. The economic structure remained intact, but the law no longer provided a sanctioned channel for their entry. This mismatch made undocumented status inevitable. Workers who had once entered through formal contracts now crossed on their own. They did so not because they wanted to break the law, but because the U.S. had designed a system that needed their labor while denying them legal permission to exist.

The U.S. engineered the conditions of undocumented migration. It created dependency, then criminalized the people it had depended on. It used Mexican workers to build its agriculture and then punished them for continuing to do the work that Americans refused to perform. It portrayed their presence as a violation of national integrity while relying on their labor to sustain the nation’s economy.

It is impossible to understand modern immigration enforcement without understanding this history. The Bracero Program was not a temporary wartime fix. It was a blueprint. It demonstrated that the U.S. could maintain a stable underclass by manipulating borders, contracts, racial categories, and legal status. It showed that the state could extract labor without making political or social commitments to the workers. It normalized a system in which Mexican labor was essential but Mexican life was disposable.

When ICE detains farmworkers today, it is enforcing the same logic. When migrants are deported after decades of labor, it is enforcing the same logic. When communities live in fear of raids while harvesting the country’s food, carrying its healthcare workforce, progressing its universities' scholarship, the U.S. is enforcing the same logic. The violence of the Bracero Program did not die with its cancellation. It became the foundation of the modern immigration regime.

PART 5. OPERATION WETBACK, POST BRACERO REPRESSION, AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF MIGRATION AS STATE STRATEGY

The end of the Bracero Program did not mark the end of coerced labor. It marked the beginning of a new era of policing. When the U.S. shut down the program in 1964, it did not redesign its agricultural economy or create humane legal pathways for the workers who had become indispensable. Instead, it preserved the same economic dependence on Mexican labor while eliminating the formal entry route. The contradiction was immediate: the economy still needed workers, but the law now denied them a way in. This contradiction did not destabilize the system. The U.S. turned it into an instrument of control.

Rather than reform its labor structure, the U.S. expanded its enforcement apparatus. This criminalization did not begin in the 1960s. It had roots in earlier campaigns, most notoriously Operation Wetback in 1954. Although rarely taught in U.S. schools, it was one of the largest mass deportation campaigns in modern U.S. history. The operation revealed how the federal government understood Mexican labor: essential when required, disposable the moment it became inconvenient.

Operation Wetback unfolded at the peak of the Bracero Program. It rounded up more than a million people, many of them U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, through sweeps, raids, and military-style policing. People were forced onto buses, trains, and ships with no due process. Families were torn apart. Citizens were deported because their skin was brown. The operation was officially justified as a crackdown on undocumented workers, but its real function was disciplinary. It warned Mexican laborers that they could be removed at any moment unless they submitted to the Bracero pipeline and its conditions of exploitation.

This strategy intensified after 1964. Once the legal channel closed, Mexican workers continued to come because the economic structure required their labor. But now the state treated their presence as criminal. The U.S. did not create new visa categories, expand legal migration, or offer stability. It expanded policing. It hardened border enforcement. It built bureaucratic institutions dedicated to surveillance and removal. Undocumented migration rose not because workers suddenly broke the rules, but because the U.S. redesigned the rules to make legal entry nearly impossible.

By the 1970s and 1980s, undocumented workers had become essential to agriculture, construction, meatpacking, domestic work, and other industries. Employers exploited their illegalized status, threatening deportation to suppress organizing and keep wages low. This illegality was not a side effect of policy. It was the purpose of policy. Criminalization produced a workforce that was cheap, silent, and afraid.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 is often portrayed as a compromise because it granted amnesty to millions of undocumented people. But its deeper function was punitive. It introduced employer sanctions that were almost never enforced. It intensified border militarization. It expanded forms of surveillance that made workers more vulnerable while keeping their labor exploitable. The law did not challenge the racialized labor order built through the Bracero era. It fortified it.

As border militarization grew, so did the risks facing migrants. Deaths in the desert increased. Smugglers gained power. Families were separated for years. The U.S. framed these outcomes as tragic side effects of enforcement, but they were predictable results of a system designed to funnel migration into dangerous terrain while preserving a cheap labor pool inside the country. Crossing became deadly. Staying became illegal. And the state blamed migrants for the dangers it engineered.

Criminalization served two political functions. It disciplined labor, and it offered politicians a convenient scapegoat as inequality deepened, wages stagnated, and corporate power expanded. Migrants were portrayed as threats to jobs, culture, and national security-- claims rooted not in evidence but in the same racial ideology that had justified conquest, annexation, and labor exploitation for generations.

By the late 20th century, the U.S. had built a regime in which Mexican and Central American migration was criminalized not because it endangered the nation but because criminalization maintained a racial and economic hierarchy. The U.S. itself engineered the conditions of undocumented migration, then punished people for responding to those conditions. This is the central deceit of modern immigration enforcement.

Operation Wetback provided the template. The Bracero Program provided the logic. Post-Bracero repression supplied the continuity. Together, they created the foundation from which modern border militarization and ICE emerged. When the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002 and ICE shortly after, it did not represent a rupture. It was the formal consolidation of a project that had been developing for more than a century.

Modern deportation campaigns follow this same pattern. They target the communities the U.S. economy relies on. They generate fear that suppresses organizing. They criminalize workers whose presence is the direct result of U.S. policy. They present deportation as national self-defense when the actual purpose is labor control and racial ordering.

The creation of ICE in the twenty-first century did not solve a crisis. It institutionalized one.

PART 6. NAFTA, CORPORATE DOMINATION, AND THE FORCED MIGRATION ENGINEERED BY U.S. ECONOMIC POLICY

To understand modern migration, one must abandon the myth that "people simply choose to cross borders in search of a better life". Migration at scale is never a matter of individual choice. It is produced. It is engineered. It is coerced by policy, by markets, by military force, and by the violent reorganization of entire economies. Nowhere is this clearer than in the story of NAFTA.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented in 1994, is often described as a trade deal that removed tariffs and increased economic integration across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. In reality, NAFTA was one of the most aggressive corporate restructurings in modern history. It shattered the economic foundation of rural Mexico, empowered multinational corporations at the expense of workers, and forced millions into migration. It was not a neutral economic event. It was a geopolitical intervention that reordered the continent.

Before NAFTA, millions of Mexican families survived through small scale agriculture. They grew maize, beans, squash, chilies, and regional crops on communal lands that had been protected since the Mexican Revolution. These lands were not simply economic assets. They were the core of community life, cultural identity, and local autonomy. They allowed families to survive outside the violence of global markets. They were a buffer against exploitation.

NAFTA destroyed that buffer. It opened Mexico’s agricultural sector to the full force of U.S. agribusiness, which was heavily subsidized by the U.S. federal government. The corn, soy, and wheat from U.S. farms flooded the Mexican market at prices no Mexican farmer could compete with. This was not competition. It was economic warfare. The U.S. used its subsidies to undercut the livelihoods of millions of rural Mexican families, driving prices so low that small scale farming became impossible in Mexico.

At the same time, the U.S. government and U.S.-backed financial institutions pressured Mexico to eliminate protections on communal land as a condition for economic integration and NAFTA approval. As a result, in 1992, Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari amended Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, dismantling the ejido system that had protected communal land since the Mexican Revolution. Land that had once been owned collectively could now be privatized and sold. Corporations moved quickly, buying vast tracts for agribusiness, mining, and manufacturing. Rural communities lost not only their livelihoods but their land. Their displacement was not an accident. It was the predictable outcome of policies designed to open Mexico to foreign capital.

Within a decade, rural Mexico suffered one of the most severe economic collapses in its modern history. Entire regions fell into deep poverty. Millions were pushed out of agricultural life and forced into low wage industrial jobs or migration. Families that had survived for generations on their land suddenly had no chance of survival unless they left. Migration stopped being an aspiration. It became a necessity.

This is the context in which so-called “undocumented migration” surged in the 1990s and 2000s. It was not driven by people eager to break the law. It was driven by a trade agreement whose own advisers and contemporaries warned that it would devastate Mexico’s countryside.

Before NAFTA took effect, economists Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda and Sherman Robinson estimated that NAFTA-related reforms would displace about 1.4 million rural Mexicans and that roughly 600,000 of those displaced would migrate without documentation into the U.S. over five to six years. Their work was incorporated into official analyses used by Congress; a 1993 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on NAFTA, prepared at the request of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, explicitly cited their study on “Labor Issues in a North American Free Trade Area,” meaning key lawmakers had those projections in front of them before signing the agreement.

A 1995 policy paper from Michigan State University’s Julian Samora Research Institute similarly noted “substantial agreement” among analysts that millions of rural Mexicans would be displaced from agriculture as a result of NAFTA’s terms. After implementation, the warnings proved accurate. U.S. exports of heavily subsidized corn surged into Mexico, and the price paid to Mexican corn farmers fell by about 66 percent, forcing many to abandon farming; later estimates suggest that roughly 1.3 million agricultural jobs were lost in Mexico due to NAFTA, mostly among small-scale corn and bean producers, with some analyses placing rural job losses at over 2 million.

Throughout this period, the U.S. did not create new legal visa channels on the scale of the displacement its own trade policy helped generate. NAFTA’s architects were not operating in the dark; they moved ahead despite credible projections of mass rural upheaval and without providing lawful pathways for those they knew would be pushed off the land, ensuring that many would have only one option left if they wanted to survive: crossing the border without papers.

American corporations benefited from this arrangement. They moved manufacturing to Mexico to take advantage of lower wages. They recruited displaced Mexican workers through both legal and informal channels. Meatpacking plants, construction companies, garment factories, and agricultural operations in the U.S. expanded their reliance on Mexican labor. This was not charity. It was profit extraction. Workers who had been impoverished by NAFTA were now disciplined by the threat of deportation when they entered the U.S. without papers.

The U.S. created the conditions of migration and then criminalized the migrants it had economically uprooted. It claimed that people were violating U.S. sovereignty even though U.S. policy had violated their economic sovereignty first. It claimed that migrants were taking American jobs even as corporations used their vulnerable status to break unions, lower wages, and expand profit margins.

NAFTA did not bring prosperity to Mexico. It deepened inequality. It hollowed out rural communities. It empowered elites and foreign corporations. It created sweatshops on the border where Mexican workers labored under toxic conditions for wages that could not sustain a family. It reshaped the country into a zone of extraction, where land, labor, and resources could be exploited by global capital.

This economic devastation intersected with other forces that the U.S. helped unleash. As rural communities collapsed, the drug trade expanded. Cartels filled the economic vacuum created by NAFTA and the neoliberal reforms that accompanied it. Meanwhile, the U.S. escalated its so called war on drugs, a policy that destabilized entire regions, empowered violent actors, and incentivized corruption in Mexico’s police and military.

The U.S. then condemned the violence that its own policies had fueled. It portrayed migrants fleeing cartel terror as criminals instead of victims of policies the U.S. helped create. It used the violence of the drug war as justification for harsher border enforcement. NAFTA and the drug war became twin engines of forced migration. One destroyed livelihoods. The other made daily survival dangerous.

By the 2000s, the U.S. had built a border apparatus designed to block the very migrants its own policies had produced. It expanded the Border Patrol. It built fences. It created new forms of surveillance. It increased arrests. The contradiction is staggering. The U.S. destabilized Mexico through economic and security policies, then militarized its border to keep out the people it had driven north.

This is the deeper truth that is rarely acknowledged. The U.S. does not confront migration as a crisis. It manufactures migration and then manages the consequences according to its own interests. It generates displacement in Mexico through trade, militarization, and economic coercion. It then uses that displacement to justify the expansion of agencies like ICE. To be clear, immigration enforcement is not a response to crisis. It is the continuation of a colonial relationship in which the U.S. destabilizes, extracts, and then punishes.

ICE exists because NAFTA exists. ICE exists because the U.S. built an economic order that relies on exploitability, precarity, and racialized control. ICE exists because the U.S. needs workers who can be deported if they demand dignity.

Migration is not a failure of borders. It is a consequence of policies. It is the human cost of a system designed to extract wealth from one population and labor from another.

PART 7. U.S. MILITARIZATION OF MEXICO, STATE VIOLENCE, AND HOW THE WAR ON DRUGS STRENGTHENS CARTELS

Migration cannot be separated from violence. Violence cannot be separated from policy. And policy cannot be separated from power. When Americans discuss the so called border crisis, they rarely talk about the U.S's political and military decisions that have turned large regions of Mexico into zones of instability. They rarely talk about how U.S. weapons, U.S. funding, U.S. training, and U.S. foreign policy have strengthened the very forces that Mexicans are fleeing. They rarely acknowledge that forced migration is often the downstream effect of militarization directed, financed, or strategically tolerated by the U.S..

The violence that drives people north did not emerge in a vacuum. It is the consequence of a long relationship in which the U.S. has shaped Mexico’s security apparatus, armed its police and military, and imposed a drug war that has empowered cartels and destabilized communities.

To understand this dynamic, one must first understand the architecture of U.S. influence. For decades, the U.S. has funneled billions of dollars in military aid, equipment, and training to Mexico under the guise of combating drug trafficking and organized crime. Recent decades have intensified this trend. Programs like Plan Merida, modeled on earlier counterinsurgency programs in Central America, transformed Mexico’s internal security into an extension of U.S. strategic policy.

On paper, these programs aim to strengthen Mexico’s ability to combat cartels. In reality, they have deepened corruption, militarized civilian life, and created powerful armed groups that are often indistinguishable from the cartels themselves. Weapons given to the Mexican military frequently end up in cartel hands. This is not speculation. It is a documented pattern.

Assault rifles, grenades, ammunition, and tactical equipment provided by the U.S. routinely surface in cartel arsenals. In some cases, military units trained by U.S. advisers have defected to cartels, bringing their skills and equipment with them. The infamous Zetas were originally an elite unit of Mexican special forces trained in advanced combat techniques, including at U.S. facilities. When they later joined the Gulf Cartel, they brought state level combat capabilities into organized crime.

The flow of weapons from the U.S. is not limited to official transfers. American gun manufacturers and gun shops serve as a major source of cartel firepower. Lax U.S. gun laws allow traffickers to buy military grade weapons that are then smuggled into Mexico. The overwhelming majority of cartel weapons originate in the U.S.. Entire arsenals discovered in cartel raids can often be traced back to American sellers. In effect, the U.S. arms both sides of the conflict: the Mexican military and the cartels it claims to fight.

This is not an accident. It is a predictable outcome of policies that prioritize militarization over economic justice, corporate profit over human life, and surveillance over safety. When a country floods a region with weapons, it cannot pretend to be surprised when violence escalates.

The so called "war on drugs" has served as the ideological justification for this militarization. But this "war" is not a war in any meaningful sense. It is a strategy of control that benefits certain actors while devastating others. It fuels black markets, raises the profitability of illegal trade, incentivizes corruption, and provides pretext for military intervention. When drugs are prohibited, they become more valuable. When they become more valuable, powerful groups fight over them. When powerful groups fight, violence grows.

The U.S. frames this violence as proof that more enforcement is needed. This rationale is circular. U.S. policy fuels the violence --> that violence is then used to justify the policy. The cycle continues, and the people who pay the price are the civilians caught between cartel domination and state repression.

This militarization erodes democratic institutions. It increases the power of the military in civilian affairs. It encourages extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and torture by state forces. It gives rise to local warlords and corrupt officials. It destroys community safety. And it pushes ordinary people into migration.

Families do not uproot themselves lightly. They flee when survival at home becomes impossible. They flee when their towns are taken over by armed groups. They flee when their children are kidnapped or recruited. They flee when the police cannot be trusted and the military acts with impunity. They flee when the economy collapses because violence disrupts local business, travel, agriculture, and schools. They flee when the state becomes indistinguishable from the threats they fear.

The U.S. then meets these families at the border with walls, agents, surveillance towers, drones, detention centers, and the apparatus of ICE. It meets them with criminal charges. It meets them with cages. It meets them with deportation. It meets them with the narrative that they are invaders.

But the truth is simple. The U.S. is not defending itself from these migrants. It is confronting the consequences of its own policies. Forced migration is the shadow of militarization. It grows as violence grows. It grows as inequality deepens. It grows as U.S. weapons cross the border south while human beings cross the border north.

The U.S. arms the Mexican state. The U.S. arms the cartels. The U.S. imposes economic policies that destroy rural livelihoods. The U.S. fuels a drug war that rewards brutality and corruption. The U.S. then criminalizes the survivors.

This is not a failure of policy. This is policy working as designed. The drug war expands the reach of U.S. power, both militarily and economically. It benefits arms manufacturers, private security contractors, and U.S. political actors who gain votes through the language of fear. It allows the U.S. to exert influence over Mexico’s internal security. And it creates conditions that keep migration flowing in a controlled, exploitable way.

The people who flee this violence are not breaking the system. They are revealing it.

PART 8. THE CREATION OF ICE: A POST 9/11 INSTITUTION BUILT ON A CENTURY OF RACIAL CONTROL

ICE did not emerge suddenly out of national necessity. It was never meant to protect anyone. It was built to strengthen the state’s power over racialized communities, deepen labor exploitation, militarize the border, and redirect public fear away from the corporate and political forces that actually produce harm. 

Its formal creation in 2003 under President George W. Bush, inside the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was framed as a counterterrorism measure. But the agency’s real foundation was laid earlier, during the Clinton administration, through laws such as the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). These statutes dramatically expanded deportation, mandated detention, criminalized migration, fused policing with immigration enforcement, and built the statutory machinery that ICE would inherit and militarize after 9/11. Bush’s reorganization did not create a new mission; it simply gave a long-standing deportation apparatus a new paramilitary home, a counterterrorism justification, and an unprecedented budget.

To understand ICE, one must first recognize what the U.S. did after September 11, 2001. Instead of addressing the failures that allowed the attacks to occur, the U.S. government reorganized itself around the idea that danger comes from people who cross borders. It collapsed immigration, border enforcement, intelligence, and counterterrorism into a single bureaucratic empire. Immigration was militarized. Border enforcement was militarized. Communities of color were recast as threats. And the entire enforcement apparatus was granted extraordinary powers with little accountability.

In this climate of fear, the U.S. government constructed ICE, an agency whose mission was never genuinely about national security. Rather, its function was to expand the power of the state over immigrants inside the U.S. It was designed not to stop terrorism but to police communities that had long been targets of racial suspicion. It was created not to protect the country but to intensify the violence of deportation.

ICE inherited the logic of Operation Wetback, the Bracero Program, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the criminalization of border crossing, and the militarization of the Mexican frontier. It inherited the punitive architecture created by Clinton-era laws that treated migrants as criminals and expanded deportation beyond anything previously imaginable. It was built on the idea that certain populations are inherently suspicious. It was built on the assumption that the state has the right to remove people whose presence is “undesired” by the racist, white social order. It was built on the belief that movement must be policed and that belonging must be conditional.

The agency’s location inside the Department of Homeland Security was deliberate. It signaled that immigration would now be treated as a security issue rather than a social or economic one. This shift allowed ICE to wield the tools of counterterrorism against ordinary migrants: surveillance, raids, detention, informants, secrecy, data mining, and cooperation with local police. It allowed ICE to operate with an expansive definition of threat that often included people whose only so-called violation was crossing a border the U.S. had manipulated for generations.

ICE quickly grew into a paramilitary institution. It built tactical teams with military-grade weapons. It trained agents in urban assault. It coordinated with local police to create a domestic dragnet, a nationwide enforcement web designed to sweep up as many targeted migrants as possible through raids, identity checks, surveillance, and data-sharing. It built a network of private detention centers where migrants were held in abusive conditions. It framed deportation as a form of national defense. It encouraged agents to treat migrants not as people but as security targets. It became the interior enforcement arm of the largest immigration and policing system in modern U.S. history.

Yet even as ICE expanded its reach, its actions remained guided by the same contradictions that have shaped U.S. immigration policy for more than a century. The U.S. needs migrant labor, but it also needs a way to control that labor. ICE provides the fear that keeps workers compliant. It provides the threat that keeps wages low. It provides the intimidation that suppresses organizing. It provides the violence that maintains a racial hierarchy in which migrant communities are always vulnerable.

Corporate interests benefit from this arrangement. Employers who exploit undocumented labor rely on ICE to maintain the vulnerability of their workforce. Politicians benefit from it as well. They can mobilize fear of migrants to divert attention from structural inequality, declining wages, and the horrors of capitalism. ICE becomes the instrument through which the state appears strong even as it avoids confronting the real causes of American suffering: corporate power, militarism, privatization, and decades of neoliberal policy.

There is another dimension to ICE that reveals its true purpose. The agency’s record has nothing to do with terrorism. Almost all of its arrests are for civil immigration violations -- actions that are not crimes, not felonies, not threats to public safety, but administrative infractions on the level of paperwork status. ICE has repeatedly targeted people with deep ties to their communities: parents, students, workers, spouses. It has raided churches, schools, and workplaces. It has separated families. It has detained asylum seekers fleeing conditions the U.S. helped create. It has even denied detained migrants basic medical care, confiscating life-saving medications, delaying treatment, and searching hospitals for patients in need, turning healthcare settings into extensions of enforcement. The agency has used its power to spread fear rather than safety.

ICE’s operations are marked by secrecy and impunity. The agency can detain people without clear explanation. It can transfer detainees across the country with no notice to their families. It can conduct raids without warrants under the guise of administrative authority. It can pressure local police to cooperate even in places where communities oppose such cooperation. It can partner with private prison companies that profit from human confinement. These practices are not the result of rogue behavior. They are inherent to the agency’s design.

ICE is also structurally intertwined with the drug war. As violence in Mexico and Central America escalated due to U.S. militarization, more people fled for their lives. ICE responded with criminalization rather than protection. It treated refugees as lawbreakers. It blamed them for escaping conditions that U.S. policy had produced. It became the domestic enforcement arm of a broader hemispheric system in which the U.S. destabilizes regions and then punishes the people who seek safety.

The growth of ICE is not evidence of a real threat. It is evidence of a political strategy. When a nation builds an agency with thousands of agents, a network of detention centers, militarized equipment, intelligence capabilities, and authority to act with minimal oversight, it does so because it wants to use it. ICE is not a neutral institution. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of a state that has long used immigration enforcement to maintain racial hierarchy, economic exploitation, and political distraction.

ICE’s brutality is often framed as a failure of training or leadership. This is incorrect. The brutality is the point. It enforces fear. It enforces silence. It enforces obedience. It enforces the idea that belonging is conditional, revocable, and dependent on the state’s generosity. It enforces the historical message that Mexican and Central American lives are less valuable.

The agency is not broken. It is functioning exactly as intended.

PART 9. THE MORAL AND POLITICAL INDICTMENT: WHY ICE IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

There are institutions whose existence can be reformed. ICE is not one of them. It is not a malfunctioning agency in need of recalibration. It is a system built on a lie and dependent on violence. ICE exists because fear is useful. It exists because exploitation is profitable. It exists because a nation built on conquest and racial hierarchy has always required mechanisms of exclusion. To indict ICE is to confront the deeper truth that the U.S. has not yet accepted: the country’s prosperity has depended on people it refuses to treat as equals.

ICE is incompatible with democracy because democracy cannot coexist with a caste system. ICE enforces a caste. It tells millions of people that the land on which they work, raise children, build communities, pray, and love is not theirs. It tells them that their lives are conditional. It tells them that belonging is a privilege granted by the state rather than a right inherent to their humanity. It tells them that the community they help sustain can at any moment expel them as if they were contaminants rather than neighbors.

This is not an abstract moral failure. It is a daily reality. ICE forces parents to hide in their homes. It forces children to memorize phone numbers in case their parents disappear. It forces families to avoid hospitals, schools, and public spaces. It forces communities into silence. It turns daily life into a negotiation with terror. This is not compatible with democracy because democracy requires the ability to participate without fear. ICE prevents participation. The presence of ICE in a community is the presence of surveillance, intimidation, and arbitrary authority. Such conditions undermine the very idea of civic life.

ICE is incompatible with human rights because its function requires the denial of personhood. The agency cannot exist without treating people as threats rather than beings with dignity. It cannot exist without presuming guilt. It cannot exist without using confinement as punishment for civil 'violations'. It cannot exist without inflicting suffering on those who seek safety. Every structure ICE operates depends on this dehumanization. Its detention centers rely on isolation, humiliation, inadequate medical care, and psychological harm. Its raids rely on fear and surprise. Its deportations rely on the belief that some lives can be uprooted without ethical consequence.

There is no humane version of ICE because the agency’s purpose is incompatible with humane treatment. The logic of ICE demands efficiency, not justice. It demands removals, not protection. It demands compliance, not compassion. Its success is measured in bodies removed, families separated, and communities destabilized. These metrics reflect its true mission. They also reflect its lineage. ICE is heir to institutions that policed Native Americans, tracked escaped enslaved people, enforced Chinese exclusion, raided Mexican communities during Operation Wetback, and targeted Black activists during the era of COINTELPRO. It inherits the racial suspicion that has shaped every era of American policing.

ICE is incompatible with public safety because public safety cannot be built on fear. Communities are safer when they trust institutions, not when they hide from them. When ICE operates in a city, immigrant communities are less likely to report crimes, seek protection, or cooperate with authorities. This undermines safety for everyone. The agency claims to protect the public, but its actions create conditions in which violence thrives. Fear isolates. Isolation makes exploitation easier. Exploitation creates vulnerability. This is the opposite of safety.

ICE is incompatible with moral legitimacy because its existence depends on a narrative that is fundamentally dishonest. The agency portrays itself as a guardian of law, yet the laws it enforces are shaped by political manipulation rather than justice. Border laws were designed to control labor, not protect national integrity. Deportation policies were designed to discipline workers and maintain racial hierarchy. ICE enforces laws that were written to solve political problems created by the U.S. itself. It enforces laws that target the consequences of U.S. economic and military policy rather than the causes.

When people flee violence in Mexico or Central America, they are not intruding on American life. They are responding to conditions the U.S. helped create. When families cross the border seeking safety, they are not breaking the system. They are confronting the reality that the system was built on their dispossession. ICE punishes them for surviving. This is not enforcement. It is cruelty.

ICE is incompatible with economic justice because the agency protects a labor system that depends on vulnerability and repression. Undocumented workers are essential to American agriculture, construction, caregiving, manufacturing, healthcare, universities, science, and service industries. These industries rely on labor that can be underpaid, overworked, and threatened. ICE ensures that workers remain afraid. This fear suppresses wages. It prevents unionization. It enriches corporations. ICE is not a barrier to exploitation. It is the guardian of it.

The agency also enforces an unequal distribution of power. Citizens are told that undocumented migrants are the reason for economic hardship. This is a distraction. The real causes of inequality are stagnant wages, corporate monopolies, declining labor protections, and decades of neoliberal privatization. ICE diverts public anger away from those responsible for suffering and redirects it toward those who have the least. It becomes a political instrument used to avoid accountability.

ICE is incompatible with social cohesion because it fractures communities. Deportation tears families apart. It creates trauma that spans generations. Children who grow up fearing the disappearance of a parent carry that fear into adulthood. Spouses who lose partners to deportation suffer profound psychological harm. Communities become divided between those who can live openly and those who must hide. No society can cultivate trust when its members are forced to live in constant dread of state violence.

ICE also damages the moral fabric of the country because it normalizes cruelty. When a nation tolerates the caging of children, the separation of families, and the removal of people who have lived in the country for decades, it accepts the idea that some lives matter less. This acceptance corrodes the conscience. It creates a society in which empathy becomes selective and citizenship becomes a weapon.

ICE is incompatible with truth because the agency's existence is justified by myths. The myth that migrants are dangerous. The myth that borders are natural. The myth that deportation restores order. The myth that the U.S. is overwhelmed rather than responsible. These myths are repeated because the reality is politically inconvenient: migration is a consequence of policies the U.S. has enacted. The right to move is a human right. And no level of enforcement will stop people from seeking life.

ICE is incompatible with justice because justice requires the recognition of shared humanity. ICE requires its denial.

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PART 10. A LEFTIST STRATEGY: HOW ORGANIZERS CAN ACTUALLY FIGHT AND WEAKEN ICE EVERYWHERE 

Abolishing ICE is not the act of a single federal vote. It is the slow strangulation of a violent institution through hundreds of small, coordinated, local acts that cut off its supply lines. ICE is powerful only because cities, counties, and states quietly hand it information, jail space, police cooperation, and political legitimacy. When organizers learn to attack those points simultaneously, ICE becomes a hollow shell. The far left strategy relies on granular logistics, step-by-step disruption, and a deep understanding of how local institutions feed federal ones.

This section explains not just the why, but the how, using both conceptual paragraphs and tactical bullet-point instructions.

I. INFORMATION WARFARE: UNDERSTANDING AND EXPOSING ICE’S LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Movements begin by seeing the invisible. ICE operates through a web of informal channels: local police calling agents off the record, probation officers giving appointment times to field offices, county sheriffs handing over jail release data, and school districts sharing family information through state databases. The first phase of the campaign is to map this infrastructure with surgical precision.

The conceptual goal is simple: expose the entire system so it can be attacked.
The practical process is rigorous and coordinated.

LOGISTICAL STEPS FOR MAPPING ICE’S SYSTEM

Build a research team:

• Recruit 10-25 volunteers with roles:

• 3 public records experts
• 2 researchers
• 2-4 bilingual field interviewers
• 1-2 lawyers
• 2-3 journalists or media allies
• Establish encrypted communication (Signal, ProtonMail)
• Create a shared spreadsheet with access restricted to core team

Conduct public records warfare:

File 15-25 staggered Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or Public Records Act (PRA) requests targeting:

• Police: ICE emails, detainers, gang databases
• Sheriff: jail logs, transfer logs
• Courts: warrant requests, ICE presence records
• Schools: law enforcement data sharing
• Hospitals: immigration status protocols

Use “rolling requests”: this means sending follow-up letters every 10-14 days asking for status updates, clarifying timelines, and narrowing the request if needed. Agencies often delay or ignore requests; rolling follow-ups prevent them from quietly burying your paperwork.

Track agency delays: keep a spreadsheet noting which agencies miss deadlines, stall, or refuse to release records. Many states impose legal timelines (10, 20, or 30 days). Once an agency violates them, escalate by filing appeals, notifying their legal counsel, contacting journalists, or threatening litigation. The goal is to pressure the slowest agencies until they comply.

Run field intelligence interviews (continually):

Conduct interviews to uncover the parts of ICE’s machinery that never appear in official documents. Public records reveal only the formal channels; field interviews expose the informal, off-the-books, and illegal practices ICE relies on. The goal is to understand how ICE actually operates in your city: where it arrests, how it gathers intelligence, who tips it off, and which institutions quietly cooperate.

Interview 50-150 people who directly experience or witness ICE activity:

• Recently detained individuals (to document arrest locations, tactics, and cooperating agencies)

• Family members of detained or deported people (to identify patterns of surveillance, vehicle tracking, and home raids)

• Day laborers (frequent targets of worksite stings and undercover operations)

• Street vendors (often surveilled in public spaces where ICE piggybacks on local police)

• Janitors in public buildings (they see law enforcement movements inside courthouses, hospitals, and city offices)

• Teachers and staff in immigrant-majority schools (schools are often pressured, illegally, to share data or allow ICE onto campus)

Each group provides a different piece of the puzzle: who ICE targets, who calls ICE, which neighborhoods are monitored, what times raids occur, which employers collaborate, and how agents move through schools, hospitals, streets, and workplaces.

• Log everything in encrypted format.
• Identify patterns in timing, geography, tactics, and cooperating institutions.
• Cross-reference interview findings with public records to map ICE’s local infrastructure with precision.

Produce an ICE Infrastructure Map:

• Map:

• Known raid sites
• Jail transfer hubs
• Employer collaboration hotspots
• School and hospital vulnerabilities
• Courthouse pickup locations
• Mark each with a threat rating (Low/Medium/High)
• Release a redacted public version and keep an internal full version
• You release two versions of the ICE Infrastructure Map, because they serve different purposes and protect different groups.

A public version is meant to mobilize communities, pressure institutions, expose patterns, and generate media attention without endangering sources or revealing tactics ICE can adapt to. It includes general locations, broad patterns, and safe-to-share findings. It is designed to educate, not to compromise people’s safety.

A full internal version contains sensitive details that cannot be released publicly: the names of cooperating officers, employers who tip off ICE, school administrators who share student data, hospitals that call agents on patients, exact times and days of raids, and the identities of informants. Revealing this information publicly could expose vulnerable people, jeopardize whistleblowers, allow ICE to modify its tactics, or lead to retaliation against interviewees. The internal version is for organizers only.

This dual-structure ensures the campaign has maximum public pressure while maintaining maximum operational security.

II. DISRUPTION AND OBSTRUCTION: HOW TO INTERFERE WITH ICE’S DAILY OPERATIONS

Once the map exists, the next step is to disrupt ICE’s rhythm. ICE depends on routine: early-morning arrests, quiet courthouse pickups, predictable jail transfers. If activists can make these routines unpredictable, noisy, and publicly visible, ICE’s efficiency collapses.

Conceptually, obstruction forces ICE out of the shadows. It transforms every action into a public confrontation and imposes political, financial, and operational costs.

LOGISTICS FOR A DIRECT-RESPONSE INFRASTRUCTRE

Build a rapid-response architecture (Week 1-4):

• Create a multilingual emergency hotline so community members can immediately report ICE sightings, raids, arrests, vehicle movement, courthouse presence, hospital surveillance, or employer-initiated stings. The hotline serves as the nerve center: it alerts volunteers, dispatches responders, verifies information, and documents every incident for legal, media, and organizing use.
• Recruit 200-500 volunteers into alert groups
• Divide into zones with 5-10 responders each
• Train volunteers in:
• filming agents without interfering
• documenting badge numbers
• speaking to media
• de-escalation
• Establish a dispatcher system:
• rotating shifts
• 24/7 coverage
• clear activation protocols

LEGAL BOUNDARIES: WHAT NOT TO DO

This guide does not encourage or condone any action that violates the law. Community defense is powerful precisely because it is public, disciplined, documented, and lawful. The goal is to expose ICE, not to give the state an excuse to criminalize organizers. The following actions are illegal, dangerous, and absolutely advised against:

• Physically blocking ICE vehicles or agents
  (This can be charged as obstruction, interference, or assault, and it gives ICE the narrative it wants.)

• Attempting to prevent an arrest through physical means
  (Do not grab, touch, or stand in front of agents; do not surround vehicles; do not interfere with officer movement.)

• Directing someone to flee from ICE custody
  (Providing legal information is protected; instructing someone to run is not.)

• Entering restricted or secured government areas
  (Jails, detention centers, court back entrances, and federal property have their own criminal statutes.)

• Impersonating law enforcement or officials
  (Even casually claiming authority can lead to felony charges.)

• Tampering with evidence, documents, or government property
  (Every action in this strategy relies on transparency, not sabotage.)

Community defense must be rooted in observation, documentation, legal escalation, public pressure, and disciplined non-interference. When movements stay within these boundaries, they protect both the people being targeted and the organizers themselves. The power of this strategy comes from its visibility, its credibility, and its ability to reveal the violence of the system without giving the system a pretext to retaliate.

Courthouse interventions (continuous):

• Station 3-10 observers in high-traffic courts daily
• Use text alerts to flood the courthouse if ICE arrives
• Organize “legal escort teams” who walk people safely to exits
• Coordinate with lawyers to file emergency motions during arrests
• Livestream ICE presence to create instant public pressure
• Demand chief judges issue anti-ICE directives

Jail transfer blockades (as needed):

• Monitor online jail rosters hourly
• Identify inmates with ICE holds
• Assemble 20-50 people outside jail exits during release windows
• Bring faith leaders for moral leverage
• Call media to film ICE attempts to extract individuals
• Force sheriffs to choose between ICE cooperation or public scandal

Employer exposure campaigns (targeted):

• Interview workers about threats from bosses
• Document violations with timestamps, photos, and testimonies
• File labor complaints against employers
• Organize demonstrations outside businesses
• Leak employer-ICE collaboration emails to local press
• Pressure unions to blacklist abusive employers

III. LEGISLATIVE CAPTURE: FORCING CITIES AND STATES TO BREAK WITH ICE

After public pressure builds, organizers escalate to city councils and state legislatures. The goal is to force binding, loophole-free laws that sever the deportation pipeline. Politicians rarely act out of conscience; they act out of pressure. Movements win by making collaboration with ICE politically toxic, meaning that any official who supports ICE faces voter backlash, public condemnation, and serious damage to their credibility. Legislative capture, which means reshaping laws so that they reflect the movement’s power rather than ICE’s influence, transforms the legal environment from one that enables deportation into one that restricts it at every turn. 

For this strategy to make sense, readers must understand that cities and states have real power over ICE. ICE is federal, but it cannot function without local institutions. It depends on city and county institutions for nearly all of its ability to function: jail access, data pipelines, police cooperation, court information, probation schedules, hospital notifications, and school records. Cities and states cannot abolish ICE, but they can legally cut off the support systems that allow ICE to operate. The federal government cannot force local agencies to enforce federal law, a principle upheld by the Supreme Court and known as the anti-commandeering doctrine. This creates a wide legal space where cities and states can block ICE from receiving information, using facilities, accessing databases, or collaborating with local officers. When lawmakers understand this, they can write binding statutes that make ICE almost non-functional within their jurisdictions.

Legislative capture shifts the terrain in a fundamental way. Instead of these instutitions voluntarily cooperating with ICE because nothing stops them, the movement creates laws that forbid that cooperation. Instead of allowing ICE access to sensitive information like jail release times, school records, hospital patient data, probation schedules, and local police databases through informal permissions, the new laws impose explicit prohibitions that block ICE at every step. Instead of relying on the personal ethics or goodwill of individual officials, the strategy replaces that uncertainty with binding, enforceable statutes that require non-cooperation regardless of who is in office.

Logistics for Legislative Capture

Identify swing officials:

• Analyze voting records.
• Study campaign donors.
• Identify officials vulnerable to public pressure.
• Identify officials who seek moral legitimacy.
• Build dossiers showing each official’s ties to ICE or private detention money.

Apply coordinated pressure (continuous):

• Flood district offices with calls.
• Hold sit-ins inside city hall.
• Confront officials at public events.
• Stage vigils outside their homes.
• Mobilize student walkouts.
• Have unions issue public letters of condemnation.
• Publish media exposés linking officials to deportations.

Write airtight legislation:
Movement lawyers draft laws that include:

• total bans on police cooperation
• mandatory nondisclosure of immigration status
• prohibitions on honoring ICE detainers
• bans on private detention contracts
• requirements for judicial warrants
• restrictions on data sharing across all city systems
• and independent oversight boards with subpoena power

Dominate public hearings:

• Prepare 50-200 community members to testify.
• Bring children affected by raids.
• Provide translators.
• Tailor testimony to officials likely to break.
• Ensure every hearing is recorded and shared publicly.
• Coordinate media saturation before and after hearings.

Monitor implementation (post-passage):

• Create whistleblower hotlines.
• Conduct compliance checks at police stations.
• Audit jail logs monthly.
• Identify agency heads resisting implementation.
• Escalate pressure on non-compliant departments.

Statewide Patient-Protection Legislation for People in ICE Custody

One of the least visible layers of ICE’s power operates inside hospitals. Detained people arrive handcuffed to gurneys, flanked by armed guards, treated as security threats rather than patients. Hospital rooms quietly become extensions of detention facilities. Families are blocked from visiting. Attorneys are denied access. Interpreters are interrupted. Clinicians are pressured to violate confidentiality. Nurses and doctors often do not know what they are allowed to refuse, what patients are entitled to, or how to contest ICE interference. This confusion is not accidental. ICE thrives where professional norms remain unwritten, where boundaries are ambiguous, and where fear or uncertainty produces silence.

States have the authority to stop this. They regulate hospitals, licensing boards, patient rights, privacy law, professional standards, and medical-legal protocols. This means states can create legally binding, enforceable patient-rights statutes that activate the moment a detained person crosses a hospital threshold. These laws can transform hospitals from de facto extensions of ICE custody back into what they are meant to be: spaces of care rather than surveillance.

To build these protections, organizers must push for statewide legislation that converts clinical norms into statutory rights. These laws must apply to every hospital, clinic, emergency department, and urgent care setting in the state, regardless of ICE’s demands or the preferences of individual facilities. Winning this legislation requires hospital workers to operate as a disciplined political unit. 

THE STRATEGY UNFOLDS IN 3 LAYERS: 

1. Drafting the bill, 
2. Securing institutional allies, and 
3. Lobbying lawmakers with precision calibrated to their motivations.

1. Drafting the Bill: How Hospital Workers Begin

Hospital workers do not wait for outside lawyers to speak on their behalf. They begin by producing the first draft grounded in their lived experience.

Steps for Draft Creation:

• Form a working group of 10-20 workers from ED, ICU, L&D, inpatient wards, psych, surgical specialties, registration, social work, chaplaincy, and interpreters.
• Document 20-40 real cases of ICE interference: shackling, blocking family communication, denying interpreters, preventing attorney access, demanding records, interrupting clinical care.
• Identify the rights patients should have: the right to unshackling; the right to privacy; the right to communicate with family; the right to attorney access; the right to refuse questioning; the right to make medical decisions without ICE presence.
• Write a one-page plain-language “rights framework,” then partner with movement-aligned attorneys to convert it into statutory text.

2. Risk Management Alignment

• Hospitals fear litigation more than they fear ICE. 
• Organizers use this structural fact to build institutional neutrality or support.

Steps for Hospital Buy-In:

• Present documented cases to hospital counsel showing where ICE conduct created HIPAA exposure, EMTALA violations, excessive-force liability, wrongful-death risk, and/or breaches of consent.
• Demonstrate that a statewide patient-rights law protects hospitals by said law codifying clear boundaries and shifting legal responsibility away from the institution and onto the state framework.
• Recruit risk-management departments as quiet allies; they will warn administrators that opposing the bill exposes the hospital to unnecessary liability.

3. Legislative Lobbying: Moving Lawmakers

• Hospital workers then approach lawmakers as a unified bloc with moral authority and institutional legitimacy.

Steps for Lobbying:

• Meet legislative staff first; they determine whether a bill moves forward.
• Deliver a packet containing the bill summary, case examples, union or worker-group endorsements, and the clean draft.
• Arrive in hospital attire; the visible presence of workers creates pressure no consultant can replicate.
• Frame the bill as a patient-safety statute and a hospital liability shield, not an immigration bill.

The core tactic is tailoring the pitch to each legislator.

4. Tailoring the Ask to Legislator Types

A. Principled or Progressive Lawmakers

They seek moral wins, movement praise, and historical impact.

Script:
“We want you to introduce this bill this session. It protects patients, strengthens hospital safety, and aligns with your commitments to immigrant justice and public health. This is the kind of legislation people remember.”

B. Ambitious or Career-Driven Lawmakers

They seek media visibility, union support, and pathways to future office.

Script:
“We want you to introduce this bill. It is first-in-the-nation policy. You would lead a breakthrough that unions, nurses, and civil rights groups will publicly champion. It positions you as a statewide and national leader on humane healthcare.”

C. Hostile, Centrist, or Transactional Lawmakers

They seek to avoid scandal and reduce institutional risk.

Script:
“We want you to introduce this bill. Without clear safeguards, the next viral medical-abuse scandal involving ICE will occur in your district. This legislation protects hospitals from lawsuits and shields your office from backlash. Supporting it is the safest option.”

5. Universal Messaging That Moves All Lawmakers

Two arguments influence every political orientation:

1. “This bill protects hospitals from liability when ICE violates patient rights.”

2. “This bill prevents scandals that will land on your desk.”

These are the levers that move even the most resistant legislators.

IV. STARVING THE OPERATION: CLOSING THE SYSTEMIC PIPELINES THAT FEED ICE

Even after our protective laws pass, institutions continue to collaborate by default. Schools, hospitals, and courts often maintain old habits that funnel people into ICE custody. The Leftist approach understands that policy on paper is meaningless without deep structural transformation inside institutions.

Conceptually, “starving the operation” means rewriting the internal operations of public institutions so that they become ICE-resistant by design.

LOGISTICS FOR INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION

Schools

How organizers make these changes happen:
By winning school-board resolutions, negotiating with teachers’ unions, and getting district legal counsel to adopt binding rules that administrators must follow.

• Train teachers on non-collaboration protocols
  Done by inserting mandatory annual training into the district’s professional development schedule.

• Remove immigration-status questions from enrollment forms
  Done by submitting a policy revision through the school board and forcing the registrar to update all forms.

• Install “ICE cannot enter without a judge’s warrant” signs
  Done by having the superintendent approve standardized signage that all principals must post.

• Encrypt student-data systems
  Done by requiring the district’s IT department to encrypt sensitive fields under a board-approved privacy policy.

• Create rapid-response plans for raids near campuses
  Done by embedding these procedures into the district safety manual that principals must follow.

• Provide know-your-rights workshops to parents
  Done by partnering with PTAs and securing district authorization to host trainings on campus.

Hospitals and Clinics

How organizers make these changes happen:
By pushing governing boards, ethics committees, compliance offices, and unions (nurses, residents, techs) to adopt binding “medical sanctuary” policies that restructure hospital operations.

• Rewrite intake procedures
  Done by modifying EMR templates through the compliance office.

• Ban immigration-status documentation
  Done by updating hospital policy manuals and prohibiting those fields in the EMR.

• Train medical staff to refuse ICE information requests
  Done by mandating annual trainings administered by the hospital’s legal and ethics departments.

• Require ICE agents to wait outside hospital property
  Done by adopting a “no law enforcement in patient areas” policy approved by the hospital board.

• Install panic protocols in emergency rooms
  Done by integrating ICE-scenario procedures into the ER’s existing security workflow.

• Hold annual audits of compliance
  Done through mandatory audits performed by the hospital’s compliance or risk-management office.

Police Departments

How organizers make these changes happen:
By passing city ordinances, renegotiating union rules, forcing revisions to General Orders, and using public-records requests to expose non-compliance.

• Remove immigration fields from police reports
  Done by rewriting the department’s General Order on report-writing and updating the electronic reporting system.

• Train officers not to ask about immigration status
  Done by inserting mandatory training requirements into POST (police officer standards and training) curricula.

• Create disciplinary consequences for illegal cooperation
  Done by amending the city’s police-discipline matrix so violations trigger suspension or termination.

• Require public logs of all federal contact
  Done by passing a city ordinance mandating disclosure and requiring monthly publication by the Chief.

• Implement civilian oversight boards
  Done by establishing or empowering an oversight board through city-council authority.

• Conduct random compliance audits
  Done by giving the Inspector General explicit authority to audit cases at random.

Jails and Prisons

How organizers make these changes happen:
Through passing county ordinances (local laws that bind the sheriff), changing sheriff operational orders (the jail’s internal rulebook), using litigation threats (warning the county it will lose in court), and enforcing compliance through county-level oversight commissions (civilian bodies that monitor and pressure the sheriff).

• End notifications of release times
  Done by rewriting the sheriff’s release-notification policy and severing data connections to ICE systems.

• Delete data fields sent to federal systems
  Done by modifying the jail’s data-sharing agreements and removing fields from the jail-management system.

• Publish all ICE communications publicly
  Done by passing a county transparency ordinance requiring the sheriff to post these communications online.

• Require lawyers to be notified before any transfer
  Done by embedding this rule in the sheriff’s transfer procedures and mandating attorney notification.

• Block ICE from interviewing anyone without counsel
  Done by establishing attorney presence as a mandatory precondition in the jail’s interview protocols.

• Install cameras at transfer points for accountability
  Done by amending the jail’s security policy and allocating funds for surveillance upgrades.

PART 11. NATIONAL ABOLITION BLUEPRINT: HOW ICE IS DISMANTLED ENTIRELY THROUGH FEDERAL STRUCTURAL CHANGE

Local and state victories can strangle ICE’s operational environment, but they cannot eliminate the agency itself. True abolition requires a national confrontation with the legal, political, economic, and ideological infrastructure that created ICE and sustains it. ICE is not a malfunctioning agency; it is the interior enforcement arm of a border regime built on racial hierarchy, fear-based governance, and the bipartisan weaponization of “security.” It draws legitimacy from myths about criminality, order, sovereignty, and danger, narratives that stretch back through U.S. colonization, Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow policing, the drug war, and Cold War counterinsurgency.

To dismantle ICE is to reconstruct how the U.S. understands migration, belonging, obligation, and harm. Abolition must strike at ICE’s statutory authority, its budget, its detention contracts, its surveillance infrastructure, its partnerships with local police, and the political myths that preserve its necessity. No agency built on racist foundations can be reformed; it must be replaced entirely with frameworks rooted in human rights, safety, and community well-being.

This section lays out a national abolition blueprint in stages. It treats abolition not as a single act but as a sequence of structural shifts that build on one another. The stages move from culture to law to physical infrastructure to a new migration system and, finally, to trans-national repair.

Before federal dismantling can occur, movements must understand this basic sequence:

1. City and state victories weaken ICE’s access to jails, police databases, hospitals, and public institutions (the terrain reshaped in earlier sections).

2. National delegitimization collapses the cultural and political myth that ICE is necessary for safety.

3. Federal structural dismantling becomes politically and technically possible only after stages 1 and 2 succeed and is carried out through the multi-stage process that follows.

With this sequence in place, national abolition begins.

STAGE 1: NATIONAL DELEGITIMATION -- BREAKING ICE’S CLAIM TO NECESSITY

Unlike the city and state battles described in the previous section, federal abolition does not begin in Congress. Congress will not dismantle ICE while most of the country still believes the agency is indispensable to national security. The first national step, therefore, is not legislative; it is cultural and political. Delegitimization aims to destroy the story that ICE is normal, necessary, or protective. It converts ICE from a “security agency” into a national liability, an institution associated with shame, brutality, and failure.

Delegitimization is the work of forcing ICE into the same moral category as COINTELPRO, Japanese internment, forced sterilization, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Movements expose ICE’s violence, trace its lineage in racist policing, reveal its ties to corporate profiteering, and shift public consciousness until elected officials fear being associated with it. Only then does federal dismantling become politically viable.

Below are the tactical and logistical steps that build this national delegitimization architecture.

TACTICAL AND LOGISTICAL STEPS FOR NATIONAL DELIGITIMIZATION

1. Build a National Documentation Machine

Delegitimization requires overwhelming evidence -- not symbolic stories, but a permanent infrastructure that records, analyzes, and publicizes ICE’s violence.

A. Mass Testimony Infrastructure
Organizers collect thousands of testimonies from detained people, separated families, hospital workers who witnessed ICE interference, people deported to danger, and children traumatized by raids. These testimonies become verified, translated, indexed, and stored in a national archive used for lawsuits, UN submissions, congressional briefings, and mass education.

B. Searchable Public Database of Abuse
Every death in detention, medical neglect case, sexual assault, raid, use of force, hunger strike, solitary confinement incident, and hospital interference event is catalogued in a publicly searchable database organized by facility, contractor, region, and congressional district.

C. Academic and Research Partnerships
Universities partner with movements to produce rigorous public reports that dissect ICE’s injustice: mortality data, budget waste, surveillance abuses, contractor corruption, and the cartel-military-industrial links created by U.S. policy.

D. High-Impact Multimedia Exposés
Short films, animated explainers, interactive maps, and investigative collaborations make ICE’s brutality visible to audiences who do not engage with policy papers. Visual media shifts ICE from “law enforcement” to “human rights machinery of suffering.”

2. Forge a Broad National Coalition

Delegitimization succeeds only when ICE is framed as a threat to the general population, not just migrants.

A. Coalition Composition
Labor unions, teachers’ associations, nurses’ unions, faith institutions, civil rights organizations, anti-war groups, Black and Indigenous movements, LGBTQAI+ organizations, disability justice networks, tech whistleblowers, environmental justice groups, and medical associations all unite.

B. Unifying Frame

• ICE is not merely a border agency.
• ICE destabilizes neighborhoods, terrifies children, undermines workplaces, invades hospitals, militarizes police departments, and spreads surveillance technology.
• ICE threatens community well-being at every level.

C. Coalition Functions
The coalition coordinates national days of action, testimony tours, media amplification, curriculum development, and shared pressure on congressional districts. The goal is to elevate ICE from a niche immigration issue to a national moral emergency.

3. Launch a National Political Education Offensive

Delegitimization requires shifting how people understand migration itself.

A. Teach-ins and Curriculum
Movements run mass teach-ins on:

• U.S. colonization of Mexico and Central America
• NAFTA and economic dispossession
• U.S. weapons flooding Mexican cartels
• CIA interventions across Latin America
• Climate change displacement
• How ICE’s violence is structurally rooted in U.S. foreign policy

Political education reframes migration as the predictable result of U.S. actions, not an individual crime.

B. High-quality Video Campaigns
Short, accessible videos explain how ICE’s budget is wasted, how its enforcement produces no measurable safety benefits, and how alternatives rooted in human rights work in other countries.

C. Testimony Tours
Families who survived ICE raids, deportation attempts, or detention conditions speak across the country in churches, synagogues, mosques, universities, union halls, and city councils.

D. National Media Saturation
Movement-aligned journalists publish exposés; op-eds and investigative series flood national outlets; podcasts and YouTube channels amplify structural critique.

4. Deploy Legal and Information Warfare

Delegitimization accelerates when movements expose the hidden machinery behind ICE’s operations.

A. FOIA Assault
Movements file continuous FOIA requests for detention logs, death reviews, use-of-force policies, hospital access protocols, failed contractor audits, GPS tracking records, and documents revealing ICE’s surveillance partnerships.

B. Whistleblower Channels
Secure platforms allow guards, nurses, contractors, asylum officers, local police, and paramedics to anonymously leak documents.

C. Public Release of Internal Records
Every leak is published, visualized, and added to the national database. ICE’s secrecy becomes its political weakness.

D. Corporate and Contractor Investigations
Movements map the entire ecosystem surrounding ICE: private prison companies, data brokers, defense contractors, software firms, hedge funds, and lobbyists. They then use this map to identify concrete pressure points. These include divestment campaigns, shareholder resolutions, boycott pressure, procurement bans, coordinated media exposés, and targeted public-shaming. The purpose is to break the idea that ICE is a neutral bureaucracy and expose it as a corporate profit engine, whose partners can be forced to absorb reputational and financial consequences.

5. Impose Political Cost

Delegitimization culminates in making ICE politically radioactive. Politicians must fear being linked to ICE as much as they fear being linked to child separation.

A. Anti-ICE Scorecards
Scorecards rank every Member of Congress on funding votes, public statements, and committee actions related to ICE. Movements then use these rankings to direct pressure. High-scoring representatives are praised publicly and mobilized as allies. Low-scoring representatives are targeted with district-level campaigns, negative media attention, and organized constituent outreach. The purpose is to turn the scorecard into a tool that shapes behavior: officials who align with ICE face political cost, and officials who break with ICE receive visible support.

B. District-Level Pressure Campaigns
Sit-ins at district offices, disruptions of fundraisers, vigils outside homes, banner drops at town halls, and coordinated silent protests at public events increase the political cost of collaboration.

C. Electoral Shaming
Digital campaigns link every deportation, every death in ICE custody, and every hunger strike to specific congressional members who funded ICE that year. Local ads force voters to see ICE violence as a direct output of their representative.

D. Public Branding of Collaborators
Officials who support ICE funding are publicly labeled as enablers of family separation, death in custody, and medical neglect. Centrists begin distancing themselves from the agency for self-preservation.

When this stage is complete, ICE is politically radioactive.

No federal official can embrace it without paying a political price. Delegitimization clears the national terrain on which federal dismantling -- the true abolition -- becomes possible.

6. Build a Funding Structure That Cannot Be Co-opted

Delegitimization on a national scale requires real money, but it cannot rely on donors who will demand moderation or force strategic retreat. Movements therefore build a funding structure that is designed to protect political independence. This structure has three components:

A. A diversified funding base
Money comes from multiple aligned sources rather than a single benefactor. These include human rights foundations, labor unions, faith institutions, professional associations, and small-donor networks. No single funder holds enough influence to redirect the agenda.

B. Clear firewalls between funders and strategy
Funding agreements must include explicit rules: donors cannot shape messaging, water down demands, or interfere with decisions. Movements accept money only when it comes with no control over priorities, personnel, or political direction.

C. A public narrative that frames funding as collective infrastructure
Movements present funding not as charity but as investment in public record-keeping, legal oversight, data transparency, and community protection. This frames money as a tool for public accountability rather than a favor to activists.

This structure ensures the delegitimization campaign can expand nationally without being steered or softened by philanthropic caution.

7. Protect the Movement From Infiltration, Co-optation, and Internal Corruption

Any national movement that threatens federal power attracts infiltration, internal division, and attempts at co-optation. Delegitimization only succeeds if the movement builds internal systems that guard against these risks.

A. Internal transparency and shared decision-making
Major decisions, messaging shifts, and external partnerships are made through clear processes that involve multiple organizations. No single leader, donor, or group is allowed to monopolize information or control.

B. Vetting and security culture that is proportionate, not paranoid
Movements implement basic verification for people handling sensitive tasks (data, testimonies, internal communications). They use secure platforms for whistleblower materials. They avoid secretive cliques that can be manipulated. The goal is not suspicion; the goal is resilience.

C. Strict conflict-of-interest rules
Staff and partner organizations must disclose financial ties, consulting contracts, or relationships with agencies, contractors, or political actors who benefit from maintaining ICE. Violations result in removal from leadership roles.

D. Rotating leadership and skill-sharing
To prevent gatekeeping, burnout, or consolidation of power, roles rotate and skills are taught broadly. No single person becomes indispensable, which makes infiltration or co-optation less effective.

E. A political culture that treats integrity as strategic discipline
Movements explicitly frame anti-corruption as part of the abolitionist project. A movement that cannot maintain internal accountability cannot dismantle external systems of violence. Ethical discipline becomes a strategic asset, not a moral ornament.

STAGE 2: FEDERAL POWER SHIFT -- USING CONGRESS AND THE EXECUTIVE TO DEFUND AND CONSTRAIN ICE

Once ICE’s public legitimacy collapses and the agency becomes politically radioactive, its underlying structural power turns brittle. Delegitimation completes the cultural and political precondition. Stage 2 activates the machinery of federal dismantling: the budget, the executive branch, the administrative state, and immigration law.

The central theory of this phase is straightforward: federal agencies die when their budgets evaporate, their authorities are revoked, and their mandates collapse.

Abolition becomes a bureaucratic inevitability rather than a symbolic demand.

This stage unfolds through 4 interconnected arenas:

1. Congressional appropriations: Congress controls ICE’s funding lines, and cutting or redirecting these lines weakens the agency’s operational capacity.

2. Executive authority: The U.S. President and DHS leadership can halt raids, close facilities, and end programs through directives and administrative decisions.

3. Administrative restructuring: Federal agencies can be reorganized so that immigration functions shift away from enforcement bodies and toward civilian structures.

4. Statutory repeal: Congress can dismantle the legal foundations that authorize ICE’s powers, removing the statutes that sustain detention and deportation.

TACTICAL AND LOGISTICAL STEPS FOR A FEDERAL POWER SHIFT

1. Wage War Through Appropriations: Starving ICE’s Budget

The appropriations process is where agencies live or die. ICE’s annual budget runs through the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, where members can attach riders, strip funding lines, and reallocate money without passing new immigration legislation.

Movements treat the budget process as a battlefield:

A. Flood Appropriators with Pressure
Mass calls, organized district visits, coordinated testimonies, union statements, medical associations, faith groups, and impacted families all converge on the committees. The goal is to make ICE cuts the “path of least resistance” for appropriators.

B. Cut Enforcement Funding Line by Line
Rather than one sweeping cut -- which Congress resists -- abolitionists target individual lines:

• Deportation flights
• Fugitive operations
• Detention transportation
• Local law enforcement partnerships
• Field office expansion
• Data-sharing programs
• Surveillance contracts
• Private prison renewals

Each cut weakens operational capacity without requiring a wholesale political fight.

C. Attach Strategic "Riders"

Congress can attach “strategic riders” to ICE’s budget. A rider is a short piece of binding text added to an appropriations bill. It tells an agency how it can or cannot spend its money. Even if Congress keeps ICE’s overall budget, riders can quietly shut down entire parts of the agency by forbidding their use.

Congress can attach riders that prohibit:

• Civil detention: Holding migrants in ICE facilities even though they are not accused of crimes; a rider can forbid ICE from using funds for civil immigration detention.
• Workplace raids: ICE operations where agents storm job sites to arrest undocumented workers; a rider can bar funding for these raids.
• Courthouse arrests: ICE arrests carried out at courthouses when people appear for hearings; a rider can prohibit spending money on this practice.
• 287(g) agreements: Contracts that allow local police to act as immigration agents inside jails or during arrests; a rider can ban ICE from entering or renewing these agreements.
• Data sharing with local police: Transfers of fingerprints, arrest information, or release data from local police to ICE; a rider can prevent ICE from using funds to request or receive this information.
• New contracts with private detention corporations: Agreements with companies such as GEO Group or CoreCivic to run ICE facilities; a rider can forbid ICE from signing or renewing these contracts.

These riders make enforcement impossible even when ICE technically appears funded, because the agency cannot legally use its money to carry out its core operations.

D. Redirect ICE Money Toward Humanitarian Infrastructure

Redirecting ICE’s budget does not happen automatically. Organizers must guide Congress toward specific replacements by supplying appropriators with alternatives and by reducing the political risk of cutting enforcement funds. Appropriators are the Members of Congress who sit on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and who decide how every federal dollar is allocated. These lawmakers often fear backlash if they appear weak on security. So, organizers must give them political cover and credible justification for shifting funds.

This work requires 3 concrete steps:

1. Prepare line-item replacement proposals: Movements should draft detailed budget proposals that match each cut to ICE with a corresponding investment in asylum processing, legal representation, post-release support, trauma-informed medical care, community-based case management, and language-access systems. Appropriators prefer fully formed alternatives. When movements present ready-made options, appropriators can frame the budget shift as an administrative improvement rather than a political gamble.

2. Organize testimony from affected professionals: Movements should coordinate testimony from asylum officers, public defenders, doctors, case managers, teachers, and hospital workers. These professionals should appear in appropriations hearings and submit written statements that describe the needs of their systems. Their testimony provides appropriators with expert justification for redirecting funds and serves as political cover by showing broad institutional support.

3. Concentrate district pressure on key committee members: Movements should target the home districts of appropriators with coordinated calls, office visits, clergy statements, union endorsements, and local media coverage. Concentrated pressure signals that shifting money away from ICE is politically safer than maintaining enforcement funding.

When movements carry out these steps, ICE’s collapsed budgets are replaced with investments in systems that stabilize families and support lawful immigration processes. Money does not disappear. It shifts to institutions that replace ICE’s punitive logic with a humane one. When ICE cannot fund raids, detention, surveillance, or deportation flights, the agency becomes an empty administrative shell.

2. Deploy Executive Authority -- Disarming ICE Without Waiting for Congress

The Executive Branch of U.S. Government is not a neutral institution waiting for guidance. It is a concentrated security apparatus dominated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and ICE, all of which are structurally aligned with far-right policing culture. The U.S. Presidents of both parties have historically reinforced this architecture. A hostile administration will not voluntarily weaken ICE. Movements must therefore treat executive authority as a site of forced concessions rather than a source of goodwill.

Executive actions become possible only when ICE is so politically toxic on a large-scale, so publicly discredited, and so administratively burdensome that the White House sees restrictions on ICE as the path of least resistance. Even an unsympathetic U.S. President can be pressured into issuing constraining directives when the political cost of maintaining full enforcement becomes greater than the cost of limiting it.

The steps below describe what becomes possible only when movements generate these conditions. None rely on goodwill.

A. End workplace raids

DHS leadership will not end raids on the basis that raids are unjust. Instead, they will end raids when the operational and political cost of conducting them becomes unsustainable. Movements must create legal exposure by documenting labor violations, civil rights violations, and wrongful arrests. They must also force raids to produce national scandal through real-time media coordination and worker testimony. When raids create more institutional chaos than benefit, DHS stops them.

B. Cancel private detention contracts

Private detention contracts exist because they are politically insulated revenue streams. Canceling them requires making every contract a liability. Movements must expose deaths in custody, medical neglect, and contractor fraud in ways that trigger lawsuits and public investigations. They should attack the corporations’ financial structures through shareholder resolutions, credit-rating pressure, and divestment targeting companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic. When these contracts become financially dangerous or politically radioactive, DHS abandons them.

C. Close facilities unilaterally

The U.S. President and the senior leadership of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) already possess the legal authority to shut down any ICE detention center or field office without approval from Congress. An authoritarian administration will not use this authority voluntarily. It will use it only when a specific facility becomes such a source of legal exposure, financial volatility, operational failure, and political threat that DHS concludes the facility endangers the administration’s stability more than its closure does.

Under an anti-democratic government, closures will occur only when movements create structural pressure that undermines the facility’s usefulness to the regime. The goal is not to persuade. The goal is to make the site ungovernable.

To force unilateral closure, movements must follow a disciplined set of actions that increase risk for DHS faster than DHS can contain it.

1. Build a legally documented pattern of harm that activates mandatory federal scrutiny.
• Authoritarian administrations ignore scandal but cannot ignore federal procedures that trigger investigations. Movements must file heavily substantiated complaints with the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Complaints must include hard evidence of medical neglect, retaliatory punishment, deaths in custody, staff misconduct, and unsafe conditions. These filings force internal reviews that DHS cannot easily shut down without violating its own bureaucratic architecture.
2. Flood the facility with simultaneous litigation from multiple angles.
• DHS does not fear outrage. It fears losing cases. Movements must coordinate wrongful-death lawsuits, medical-neglect suits, conditions-of-confinement suits, and civil rights claims that expose systemic failure. Lawsuits trigger budget drains, discovery obligations, internal emails becoming public, and risk assessments by DHS attorneys. When a facility accrues enough legal exposure, senior officials will conclude that maintaining it is more dangerous to the administration than shutting it down.
3. Collapse the facility’s local cooperation network.
• Detention infrastructure depends on sheriffs, county boards, hospitals, ambulance providers, and local contractors. A federal administration may not care about public opinion, but it cannot operate a detention center if local actors refuse cooperation. Movements must organize unions, clergy, medical workers, school officials, tenants’ groups, and business associations to publicly withdraw support and demand termination of local agreements. When local institutions become unwilling partners, DHS is forced into operational crisis.
4. Destabilize the contractor ecosystem that keeps the facility functioning.
• Authoritarian administrations outsource detention to private companies because it shields the state from accountability. Movements can exploit this vulnerability by targeting medical contractors, transportation firms, maintenance companies, food vendors, and security subcontractors. Filing professional complaints, exposing violations in medical licensing, pressuring insurance companies, and revealing financial misconduct can make contractors unreliable or legally compromised. When contractors cannot guarantee service, DHS cannot guarantee control.
5. Convert the facility into a national liability that threatens leadership, not policy.
• Hostile administrations dismiss public anger but react to sustained conflict that creates risk for the regime. Movements must coordinate media leaks, whistleblower testimony, and investigative reporting that links abuses directly to named DHS officials. The goal is not shame but destabilization. A facility that becomes a recurring topic in congressional oversight, state-level investigations, or international human rights reporting generates administrative volatility. DHS will calculate that closure contains the threat.
6. Create chronic operational dysfunction that drains DHS resources faster than DHS can replenish them.
• Movements should document staffing shortages, inspection failures, medical outsourcing breakdowns, retaliation complaints, safety violations, and overtime crises. They should expose these failures publicly and file them formally. When one facility consumes disproportionate administrative attention, DHS leadership will prioritize internal stability over continued operation. Closure becomes a strategic retreat, not a concession.
• Facilities will not close because the administration recognizes harm. They will close when movements generate conditions that make the facility a structural threat to the regime’s stability. Under authoritarian governance, unilateral closure happens only when a facility becomes ungovernable, unprofitable, legally volatile, and politically dangerous to keep open.

D. Terminate the Secure Communities program

Secure Communities is the federal data pipeline that links local police to ICE. When someone is arrested and fingerprinted, those fingerprints are automatically sent to federal databases. ICE then uses the match to issue detainers, which are requests asking local jails to hold people past their normal release time so ICE can take custody. ICE also uses the match to request custody transfers and to track people across jails nationwide. Secure Communities is the central machinery that feeds immigration enforcement through everyday police encounters.

Secure Communities is designed to be politically insulated. Each transfer depends on local cooperation from sheriffs, police departments, jail administrators, prosecutors, and city governments. Termination becomes possible only when movements sever these local links one by one. This requires specific, replicable actions that make cooperation more dangerous to local officials than withdrawal.

To force withdrawal from Secure Communities, movements must target each local actor with focused tactics that exploit their vulnerabilities, not their conscience.

How to force sheriffs to stop cooperating

County sheriffs are the strongest pillar of Secure Communities, because they control the jails, authorize detainers, and determine whether ICE can access people in custody. Sheriffs change course only when continued cooperation becomes legally and politically dangerous for their offices.

Expose unlawful detainers.
Document specific cases where the sheriff held people past their release time due to ICE detainers. File civil rights complaints and lawsuits naming the sheriff and the county. Sheriffs withdraw when their attorneys warn them that continued participation will produce more lawsuits and payouts.

Target county liability and insurance carriers.
Counties carry liability insurance. Movements can send litigation-threat letters not only to the sheriff but to county risk-managers and insurance carriers. Insurers often pressure counties to stop practices that increase exposure.

Create continuous local scandal.
Hold press conferences outside the jail every time a wrongful hold occurs. Release reports that tie deaths in custody, medical neglect, or family separation to the sheriff’s cooperation with ICE. Sheriffs act when local media makes their collaboration a daily political burden.

Organize county-board intervention.
County boards control budgets. Movements can flood meetings, submit formal documentation, publish financial analyses showing increased litigation costs, and pressure board members to pass resolutions ending jail cooperation with ICE. Sheriffs lose their political cover when county boards refuse to support ICE holds.

How to force city governments to stop cooperating

City governments do not fear moral outrage. They fear legal liability, budget instability, and public exposure.

Build a documented legal risk profile.
Movements must prepare memos for city attorneys showing that Secure Communities exposes the city to lawsuits for wrongful detention and constitutional violations. City attorneys pressure mayors to reduce risk.

Use institutional testimony against the program.
Organize public testimony from hospital workers, teachers, faith leaders, and business owners who explain how Secure Communities destabilizes the community and increases municipal costs. City governments withdraw when they face consistent testimony from respected local institutions.

Trigger budget oversight and hearings.
Movements can force city councils to convene hearings on police cooperation with ICE by gathering signatures or coordinating council allies. These hearings document harm publicly and make continued cooperation politically toxic.

Target police chiefs through public record exposure.
File FOIA requests for internal emails, detainer data, and ICE communication logs. Release findings that show racial profiling, unlawful holds, or misleading statements by police chiefs. City governments act when local police leadership becomes a liability.

How to force district attorneys to stop cooperating

District attorneys indirectly feed Secure Communities by pursuing charges that trigger detention and by cooperating with ICE in courthouses.

Reveal cases where prosecutions lead directly to deportation of nonviolent community members.
Movements can partner with public defenders to document cases where DA charging decisions funneled people into ICE custody. Publicize these cases widely.

Use electoral accountability.
District attorneys fear losing elections. Movements can publish scorecards rating them on cooperation with ICE, send questionnaires, run challengers, and mass distribute flyers connecting each deportation to the DA’s decisions.

Organize professional pressure from legal institutions.
Partner with bar associations, law school clinics, and civil rights lawyers to publicly condemn courthouse arrests and prosecutorial cooperation with ICE. Professional criticism directly threatens DA reputation.

Expose courthouse surveillance and ICE interactions.
Document ICE presence at courthouses and show how DA cooperation enables it. When DA policies are tied to public fear, court non-appearance, and community instability, the DA’s legitimacy erodes.

How to generate litigation threats that force withdrawal

A litigation threat is a formal legal warning from civil rights attorneys that the sheriff, city, or DA is violating the Constitution and will be sued if the practice continues. Movements should:

• And written notices citing specific unlawful detainers
• Attach affidavits, medical records, or incident logs
• Reference prior court rulings against similar counties
• Copy county attorneys, city attorneys, and insurance carriers
• Publicize the notice immediately to local press

Officials withdraw not because they fear the activists but because they fear losing the case.

What termination looks like

Termination becomes possible when Secure Communities generates more lawsuits, public documentation of unlawful holds, institutional opposition, and breakdowns in local cooperation than usable data. At this point, the program produces more instability for DHS than it resolves. Even an authoritarian administration will end it when the pipeline becomes legally dangerous and operationally unreliable.

E. Limit enforcement to violent crimes only

Prosecutorial discretion is fully controlled by DHS leadership. Prosecutorial discretion refers to the authority of the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership to decide how ICE uses its enforcement power. Even without Congress, DHS can issue internal guidance ordering ICE to target only people with recent violent convictions and to avoid arrests, detainers, or deportations for everyone else. This is not a legal restriction. It is an internal choice about priorities.

Movements can make broad enforcement politically and legally costly by documenting arrests of nonviolent community members, coordinating multi-state lawsuits challenging unlawful detainers, exposing cases where ICE harms local policing by destroying trust, and flooding the public record with evidence that nonviolent arrests yield no public safety benefit. When these harms become impossible to ignore, DHS leadership narrows ICE’s enforcement priorities out of institutional self-preservation, not moral conviction.

F. Reassign ICE agents into non-enforcement roles

ICE will not willingly shrink enforcement personnel. Reassignment of their agents occurs only when enforcement becomes operationally unsustainable. Movements can create these conditions by filing complaints and lawsuits targeting specific field offices, pressing congressional committees to scrutinize misconduct, and exposing logistical failures so severe that DHS is forced to redirect personnel to administrative roles in order to stabilize internal operations.

What this achieves

Executive authority becomes a terrain of forced retreat, not cooperation. ICE is disarmed operationally when movements create internal legal risk, administrative overload, contractor instability, public scandal, loss of local cooperation, and reputational damage severe enough to threaten DHS leadership. In an authoritarian executive landscape, this is how agencies are weakened: not through persuasion, but through sustained destabilization that makes full enforcement impossible to maintain.

3. Transfer Immigration's Functions to Civilian Agencies -- Ending ICE’s Institutional Logic

Abolition requires removing immigration processing from the enforcement apparatus entirely. ICE’s existence rests on the belief that migration must be handled by armed police. To dismantle this logic, its functions must be transferred to civilian bodies.

A. Create an Independent Office of Migration Services

This new civilian entity handles:

• asylum processing
• humanitarian parole
• case management
• refugee integration
• family reunification
• trauma-informed interviewing

It is staffed by social workers, humanitarian officers, interpreters, cultural specialists, and trauma-trained personnel -- not armed agents.

B. Transfer Asylum Adjudication Away From DHS

Under abolition, asylum adjudication moves to an independent civilian body or a restructured Department of Justice with strict protections against political interference.

C. Replace Detention With Community-Based Case Management

Abolition replaces cages with structured, nonpunitive systems that still ensure people attend their hearings.

What this is:

A case manager is a trained staff member of a nonprofit or community organization contracted to support migrants. Their role is to provide court reminders, arrange transportation, ensure language access, connect people to legal help, and help them navigate basic needs. They offer guidance and stability, not surveillance or enforcement.

Why it works:

Case management programs show 95 to 99 percent court-appearance rates without detention or policing.

How movements force it:

• Expose Detention abuse to create legal liability.
• Document Costs showing cages are far more expensive than case management.
• Pressure Counties to end detention contracts so DHS loses jail space.
• Publicize Compliance data that removes the justification for detention.

When cages become legally dangerous and financially wasteful, DHS adopts case management because it becomes the least risky administrative option.

D. Build Civilian-Centered Regional Reception Centers

• These centers provide temporary shelter, fully funded legal representation, medical care, and access to family contact for newcomers.
• They become the backbone of post-ICE migration governance.

This transition destroys the ideological core of ICE: the idea that migration is a threat requiring armed enforcement.

4. Repeal ICE’s Legal Foundations: Dismantling the Statutory Architecture

ICE was built on a specific legal foundation: Clinton-era laws that merged policing with migration and criminalized border-crossing in unprecedented ways.

Abolition demands attacking this statutory bedrock.

A. Overturn IIRIRA (1996)
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act created mandatory detention, expedited removal, expanded deportability categories, and eliminated judicial discretion.
Its repeal would collapse ICE’s legal infrastructure overnight.

B. Repeal Mandatory Detention Statutes
Ending mandatory detention restores individualized assessment and shuts down the conveyor belt that feeds the detention system.

C. Abolish “Criminal Reentry” as a Felony (8 U.S.C. § 1326)
This statute funnels thousands of migrants into federal prison every year and enables ICE to treat migration as criminality. Its repeal ends the criminalization pipeline.

D. Eliminate the “Aggravated Felony” Categories
These categories -- often not felonies at all -- trigger automatic deportation and lifelong exile. Removing them restores proportionality.

E. Undo AEDPA’s Deportation Expansions
The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act expanded deportation for minor crimes and gutted legal protections. Dismantling these provisions restores due process.

Statutory repeal ensures that even if ICE’s name is revived in the future, its power cannot be resurrected.

When this stage is complete, ICE collapses from multiple angles.

• Its budget is hollowed out.
• Its enforcement powers expire.
• Its detention facilities shutter.
• Its functions shift to civilian agencies.
• Its statutory foundations dissolve.
• Its personnel lose their enforcement mandate.
• Its political legitimacy is gone.

Federal abolition becomes not only possible, but inevitable.

STAGE 3: DISMANTLING ICE’S DETENTION INFRASTRUCTURE

ICE’s power rests not only on law, funding, or bureaucratic structure. It rests on concrete and steel.

The agency operates through a vast archipelago of detention centers: private prisons, county jails, converted warehouses, transport hubs, field offices with holding rooms, and black-site style medical isolation units. This network is maintained through a lattice of federal contracts, county-level agreements, private prison lobbying, data-sharing pipelines, and administrative secrecy.

To abolish ICE, the detention infrastructure must be dismantled piece by piece. This is not symbolic. The physical disappearance of detention centers is what transforms abolition from an idea into a material fact. When the cages disappear, the system collapses.

Stage 3 is the dismantling of ICE’s carceral geography: closing facilities, breaking contracts, ending transfers, replacing detention with humane community-based programs, and severing the political economy that keeps detention profitable.

This can be achieved through 5 phases:

First, Understand What You’re Trying to Kill: How ICE Detention Actually Works

• See detention as a supply chain, not just a building. Each facility is part of a chain: ICE arrest --> local jail or private prison --> transport contractors --> immigration courts --> deportation or release. At each link there is a contract, a budget line, and a decision-maker. The point is not only to protest at the prison gates, but to understand who signed which document that allows ICE to use those gates in the first place.

• Learn who legally controls each cage. Every detention site has a specific entity that makes the relationship with ICE possible: a county board voting on an intergovernmental service agreement, a sheriff who signs a memorandum of understanding, or a private prison company that holds a direct contract. You cannot “pressure ICE” to close a facility if the real power sits with five county commissioners you have never named. Stage 3 is about shifting focus to those people.

• Follow the money with unsentimental precision. Detention survives because someone is getting paid: counties chasing per-diem reimbursements, corporations selling “bed space,” medical subcontractors billing Medicaid and state funds. The goal is to show that detention is either a bad deal financially (which it often is) or a politically toxic source of profit. In both cases, you are turning the money that sustains detention into a liability.

Phase 1: Research and Power Mapping Around a Specific Facility

• Obtain and dissect the ICE contract. Use state public records laws to request: the full detention contract, amendments, inspection reports, payment schedules, and any correspondence between ICE and the county or company about bed space. Sit down with a small group and literally read line by line: who signs renewals, when renewal dates hit, what early-termination clauses say, who pays for medical care, and what occupancy guarantees exist. The point is to walk away with a simple internal memo: “This contract lives or dies at this committee meeting, with these three signatures, on this timeline.”

• Build a basic power map of local decision-makers. Create a 1-page profile for each relevant actor: county supervisors, sheriff, mayor, state legislators whose districts cover the facility, executives at the private company. For each, capture how they get elected, who funds them, which unions or churches they rely on, what scandals they fear, and whether they have ever spoken publicly about immigration or “public safety.” This turns “the county” from an abstraction into a list of specific humans whose careers can be threatened.

• Quantify financial and legal vulnerability. Request or estimate how much the county spends on staffing, overtime, lawsuits, medical care, transportation, and insurance versus what it receives from ICE. Pair this with any existing lawsuits, wrongful-death claims, inspection failures, or OSHA violations. The goal is to build a short, blunt narrative: “This facility is a legal and financial liability for local taxpayers, and closing it is the fiscally conservative choice.”

• Document the human cost in a way that can be deployed later. Through visits, calls, and letters, collect detailed stories from detained people and their families: medical neglect, retaliation, solitary confinement, language barriers, blocked legal calls. Do not just gather trauma; organize it into patterns, with dates, names, and corroboration. These stories will become the backbone of media exposés, testimony, and legal complaints that make the facility politically radioactive.

Phase 2: Running a Contract-Shutdown Campaign (County or Private Facility)

• Define a concrete demand rooted in the contract timeline. Instead of “shut down detention,” demand: “The County Board must vote by [date] not to renew the ICE detention agreement,” or “The Sheriff must issue a written notice ending the ICE housing agreement within 30 days.” Tie your campaign to the specific renewal or termination clause you already identified, so officials cannot wiggle out with vague promises.

• Organize a small but disciplined local coalition. Pull together a core group: impacted families, one or two legal organizations, a faith coalition, a nurses’ or teachers’ union local, students, and at least one friendly journalist. Agree on a simple division of labor: who handles public education, who coordinates turnout for meetings, who drafts talking points, who liaises with lawyers, who monitors the contract timeline. The coalition does not need prestige; it needs reliability.

• Turn every public meeting into a referendum on the contract. Once the contract timeline is live, you treat every county board meeting, budget hearing, or sheriff’s town hall as an opportunity to force a choice: keep ICE or keep your political future. You script testimonies so they hit the same core themes (financial waste, legal risk, human harm), rotate speakers (especially local residents and workers), and follow up with direct confrontations in hallways or lobby areas. Your goal is for officials to dread the words “ICE detention” appearing on any agenda.

• Use targeted escalation, not performative disruption. Escalation is not about being the loudest; it is about making collaboration with ICE more costly each week. That can mean: releasing financial analysis to local media before budget votes; staging a clergy-led vigil outside the private prison CEO’s house; publishing ads with photos of local children whose parents are detained; or organizing a workplace action in a hospital that sends detainees to that facility. Each action should move a specific decision-maker closer to terminating the contract, not just vent anger.

• Present a face-saving exit for wavering officials. Most local politicians will not publicly admit that detention is evil. They may, however, respond to arguments that it is too expensive, too legally risky, or too unpopular with key constituencies. Provide them with scripted language -- “After reviewing the costs and liabilities, I can no longer justify this contract to taxpayers”-- and private reassurances that you will publicly credit them for ending it. You are not asking them to convert morally; you are giving them an escape hatch.

Phase 3: Blocking Transfers and Forcing Releases When a Facility Starts to Crumble

• Expect transfers the moment closure is on the table. ICE will respond to any serious threat of closure by quietly moving people out of the facility to other states. You plan for this from day one: build relationships with detained people; set up a hotline for families; train volunteers to use the ICE detainee locator; and identify which airports and bus stations have historically been used for transfers. The assumption should be: if we do nothing, people will disappear overnight.

• Pair legal strategy with disruption. Work with lawyers to prepare template emergency motions (for stays, humanitarian release, retaliation claims) that can be filed quickly when transfers are announced. At the same time, train a rapid-response team that can get to an airport, bus terminal, or jail exit with banners, cameras, and clergy willing to talk to press. The aim is not to win every confrontation, but to turn each attempted transfer into a reputational and logistical headache.

• Use delay as a weapon. ICE operates on rigid schedules and limited transport capacity. If repeated attempts to move people from a closing facility are stalled by legal filings, media scrutiny, and on-the-ground disruption, the agency reaches a tipping point where continuing to hold people becomes more burdensome than letting them go. You are not just saying “don’t deport”; you are forcing ICE to choose between spending enormous energy shuffling people around or cutting losses via release.

• Track outcomes and feed them back into the campaign narrative. Every blocked transfer, every emergency stay, every family reunited is logged and turned into public evidence that the community is effectively resisting and that closure leads to release rather than chaos. This both builds morale internally and undercuts law-and-order narratives officials lean on to defend detention.

Phase 4: Building and Defending Non-Carceral Alternatives So “Where Will They Go?” Has an Answer

• Design basic support infrastructure before you win. Politicians and local media will always ask: “If we close this facility, what happens to the people inside?” You need to answer that with more than slogans. Begin assembling a network of host homes, faith institutions, and community organizations willing to provide temporary housing, food, transportation, and court-navigation support for people released from detention. The existence of this network allows you to say: “We are not proposing chaos; we have a plan.”

• Create a simple case-management model that can be scaled. You do not need a full social-service agency on day one, but you do need a clear workflow: how people are referred from detention to your network; who does intake; how you track court dates; how you coordinate medical or mental health referrals; and who is responsible for follow-up. Document this process plainly so that when you pitch policymakers, you can show that “alternatives to detention” are not a fantasy but an existing practice.

• Use data from your own practice to knock down enforcement myths. As you support people through release and immigration court, track appearance rates, work participation, school enrollment, and any interactions with local police. Over time, you can demonstrate that people show up to court at extremely high rates when they have support, and that releasing them does not produce the crime wave ICE claims. This transforms your network from charity into proof that detention is unnecessary.

• Protect alternatives from being colonized by enforcement logic. Governments will sometimes try to co-opt community-based programs into surveillance tools (e.g., “supervision” that looks like probation, ankle monitors marketed as “alternatives”). Draw a hard line: your infrastructure exists to support, not to monitor. Refuse contracts or agreements that would turn your organizations into extensions of ICE or local police, even if money is offered. The credibility of true alternatives depends on that refusal.

Phase 5: Making Closures Permanent and Preventing Detention From Reappearing Under New Names

• Seal the win with law, not just announcements. After a contract is terminated and a facility is emptied, movements push for formal policies that ban future immigration detention contracts in that jurisdiction or state. This can be a county resolution prohibiting new agreements with ICE, a state bill banning private immigration prisons, or budget language forbidding the use of local funds to support ICE detention. The aim is to make re-opening politically and legally difficult.

• Strip the facility of its utility as a carceral site. Where possible, push local authorities to repurpose shuttered detention spaces for non-punitive uses: public health clinics, housing, education centers, or community spaces. When a building is visibly reinhabited by a different kind of public function, it becomes much harder for a future administration to quietly flip it back into cages. Physical repurposing is a form of insurance.

• Maintain monitoring capacity even after “victory.” After closure, keep a small team focused on watching for new contracts, new memoranda of understanding, and quiet attempts to route ICE detainees through local jails again. This can be as simple as quarterly public records requests and a standing relationship with one or two journalists who commit to covering any backsliding. The point is to show officials that the community is still watching.

• Connect local wins to a national strategy. Each closed facility should be explicitly framed as part of a larger project: “When this county walked away from ICE, it weakened the agency’s capacity to detain people anywhere". Make sure that organizers in other regions have access to your contracts, campaign materials, legal briefs, and narratives. Stage 3 is not about isolated local victories; it is about systematically shrinking the geography in which ICE can operate until the agency’s detention architecture no longer exists.

STAGE 4: STATUS TRANSFORMATION -- ENDING DEPORTABILITY ITSELF

The final stage of abolition is not about ICE’s cages or budgets. It is about the legal architecture that produces “deportable people” in the first place. ICE can only exist because the law manufactures a caste of residents with precarious or nonexistent status. Once a person is legally removable, every part of the system--courts, police, employers, ICE agents, data systems--treats them as disposable. Ending deportability is therefore the most fundamental structural reform. It does not merely constrain ICE; it eliminates the category of person that ICE is designed to target.

Ending deportability means rethinking what residency, belonging, and political membership mean in the U.S.. It requires dismantling the punitive statutes that weaponize immigration status, rewriting the legal pathways to permanent residency, removing the “crimmigration” fusion that converts police encounters into deportation, and establishing a political expectation that anyone who lives here has the right to stay here. This is not symbolic. It is a technical, legislative, and administrative transformation that permanently deactivates ICE’s legal mandate.

The Legal Logic of Deportability (What We Are Dismantling)

Before explaining how to end deportability, movements must understand its machinery. Deportability is not an inherent feature of borders. 

It is a manufactured legal status produced by 4 interacting systems:

1. Immigration law that imposes penalties for unlawful presence.
   This includes reentry bans, rules that block people from applying for a green card even when they qualify, and long wait periods that make it nearly impossible for millions to regularize status.

2. A criminal code that links convictions to automatic deportation.
   The “aggravated felony” category is notoriously broad, retroactive, and often applies to minor offenses.

3. An administrative system that withholds work authorization and social rights.
   Without legal status, people must survive in precarious labor markets that increase vulnerability to raids and police encounters.

4. Immigration courts designed to streamline removal rather than adjudicate belonging.
   Judges have almost no discretion. Most people have no lawyer. Procedural protections are minimal.

When the law is designed this way, deportation becomes the default. Ending deportability means removing these structural pathways so thoroughly that the system has no one left to target.

This can be achieved through 5 phases:

Phase 1: Build a Nationwide Legalization Framework That Is Simple, Fast, and Broad

Movements must reject the punitive, narrow legalization models of the past. IRCA in 1986 (the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986) imposed fees, tests, paperwork burdens, and employer verification systems that guaranteed exclusion. A genuine abolitionist program follows different principles.

1. One-step Adjustment to Permanent Residency

The process must be radically simple:

• A single application directly to permanent residency
• Civilian processing outside of DHS
• Minimal evidence requirements such as affidavits, school records, bills, or employer letters

2. Automatic Work Authorization

The moment a person applies, they receive:

• Provisional legal presence documentation
• Work authorization
• Access to state IDs and driver’s licenses
• Access to essential services related to health, safety, and family stability

This eliminates the most dangerous phase in any legalization process: the period when applicants are still deportable while waiting.

3. Equity Protections for Excluded Groups

Legalization must explicitly cover:

• Long-term residents with older criminal convictions
• LGBTQAI+ migrants fleeing persecution
• Survivors of domestic violence unable to gather documentation
• Farmworkers, caregivers, informal workers
• Climate-displaced people
• People displaced by U.S. military or economic policies

This acknowledges the U.S.’ responsibility for displacement.

C. Phase 2: Erase the Legal Traps That Keep People Permanently Precarious

Ending deportability means destroying the tripwires that trigger removal.

1. Repeal the 3-and-10-Year Bars

These bars make it impossible for millions to regularize status. They must be eliminated retroactively.

2. End “Unlawful Presence” as a Punitive Category

Unlawful presence should not generate penalties, re-entry bans, or future adjustment barriers. This requires repealing the IIRIRA provisions that weaponized presence itself.

3. Abolish Criminal Reentry Statutes

“Illegal reentry” has been used as a mass-prosecution tool. These statutes must be repealed entirely. Any remaining re-entry standards must be civil, not criminal.

4. Restore Judicial Discretion in Immigration Courts

Judges must be able to consider:

• Length of residence
• Rehabilitation
• Family ties
• Community contributions
• Humanitarian circumstances

Once discretion returns, removal becomes the exception rather than the rule.

D. Phase 3: Break the Police--ICE Pipeline by Severing Criminal Law From Immigration Law

The fusion of criminal and immigration law--crimmigration--is the hidden engine of deportability. This is where deportation becomes automatic.

1. Remove Deportation as a Possible Outcome of Criminal Sentencing

Criminal courts should not be able to impose exile as a collateral sentence. Deportation as a consequence of any conviction must be abolished.

2. Strengthen Post-conviction Relief as a Pathway Out of Deportability

People with older convictions should be able to:

• Vacate convictions
• Reopen cases
• Seek new plea agreements
• Petition for sentence reductions

This removes deportation triggers retroactively.

3. End Police and Court Data Sharing With DHS

This requires:

• Firewalls between local police and immigration enforcement
• Bans on sharing fingerprints or arrest data for civil immigration purposes
• State-level penalties for unauthorized data-sharing
• Strict separation of databases

When ICE cannot access local law enforcement systems, the deportation pipeline collapses.

E. Phase 4: Redesign the Immigration Court System Entirely

Even after legalization, some people--refugees, asylum seekers, displaced families--will need adjudication. But the current courts are engineered for removal.

A functional, humane system requires:

• Judges independent of the Department of Justice
• Universal legal representation
• Trauma-informed, interview-based adjudication
• Appeal rights equivalent to civil and criminal courts
• Civilian adjudicators trained in social work and humanitarian evaluation rather than enforcement

This replaces the deportation pipeline with a fair adjudication system.

F. Phase 5: Write a New Legal Narrative of Belonging

Law teaches the public who belongs. A system without deportability must embed new principles into federal statute.

Foundational principles:

• Residency is tied to presence and contribution, not paperwork
• Migration is a normal human process, not a crime
• People displaced by U.S. military, economic, or environmental policies have a right to refuge
• No resident should face exile as punishment
• The U.S. recognizes its responsibility for displacement and commits to repair

Once these principles are codified, exclusion loses its moral and legal standing. ICE loses its ideological foundation.

G. What Stage 4 Ultimately Accomplishes

By the end of Stage 4:

• Millions adjust to permanent residency
• The pool of removable people collapses
• Police encounters no longer feed deportation
• Criminal law no longer produces exile
• Re-entry bans and unlawful presence penalties disappear
• Work authorization becomes universal
• Immigration adjudication becomes humanitarian instead of punitive

In this environment, ICE has no function.
The legal category that gave it power is gone.

Abolition is complete when the law makes deportation impossible.

Economic Consequences of Ending Deportability

Eliminating a Racialized, Exploitative Labor Caste

If deportability ends, the U.S. economy gains $1.5-$3 trillion over a decade, because workers who are no longer governed by fear can finally realize the full value of their labor rather than having that value siphoned off through coercion. Deportability is one of the core tools U.S. capitalism uses to maintain a racialized reserve army of labor, a permanently threatened class whose fear of removal suppresses wages, weakens organizing, and ensures that employers can extract surplus value with minimal resistance. As Marx wrote, the reserve army exists so that capital can keep workers "in a state of constant insecurity" and bend the entire wage structure downward. 

 When the threat of deportation disappears, this mechanism collapses. Workers are no longer forced to accept starvation wages or unsafe conditions; they can refuse exploitation, report violations, leave abusive employers, and join unions without risking detention or exile. As their bargaining power rises, capital can no longer use a deportable underclass to undercut wages for the whole working class. Labor standards increase for all workers, citizen and noncitizen, and the sectors most dependent on super-exploited migrants (agriculture, construction, caregiving, food processing, and service work) lose their ability to depress wages through racialized vulnerability. The resulting economic gains are not a triumph of capitalist efficiency. They are the measurable effect of dismantling a system of enforced precarity that once allowed employers to capture immense wealth by keeping millions of people in a permanent state of fear.

Expanding Revenue, Consumption, and Economic Stability

Universal legalization and work authorization would generate an estimated $30-$60 billion in new federal, state, and local tax revenue annually through payroll taxes, income taxes, Social Security contributions, and Medicare funding. Legalization and universal work authorization would pull millions of people into the formal economy, increasing income taxes, payroll taxes, Social Security contributions, and Medicare funding. It would also expand consumer spending as newly secure households purchase homes, open businesses, access credit, seek medical care, and invest in education. These shifts produce long-term economic stability, higher demand, and increased local and federal revenue, strengthening the financial foundation of both communities and the national economy.

Shrinking the Immigration-Enforcement Industry and Redirecting Resources

Ending deportability would save the federal government approximately $10-$20 billion per year by eliminating detention centers, deportation flights, private-prison contracts, and surveillance systems, while employers save an additional several billion annually by no longer maintaining E-Verify compliance and audit systems. Abolishing deportability eliminates the need for detention centers, deportation flights, private-prison contracts, surveillance systems, and the police/ICE enforcement pipeline, saving the federal government tens of billions of dollars annually. Employers would also save money by no longer maintaining costly compliance systems such as E-Verify, audits, and legal consultations. As the U.S. population ages, integrating millions of long-term residents into the formal workforce stabilizes the labor market and strengthens essential sectors like healthcare and caregiving. The only entities harmed are exploitative employers and the detention/policing industry that profits from fear. Ending deportability weakens the repressive state apparatus, strengthens the collective power of the working class, and replaces a system built on coercion and racialized exploitation with one grounded in human dignity and social solidarity.

STAGE 5: BORDER DEMILITARIZATION -- ENDING THE VIOLENCE ICE WAS DESIGNED TO FEED

ICE cannot be abolished while the Southern border is treated as a war zone. Border militarization manufactures the “illegality” that ICE then enforces nationwide. It creates deadly conditions that force people to cross in remote terrain, generates criminal categories like “illegal entry,” and produces the crises that justify ICE’s existence. If ICE is the interior arm of enforcement, Border Patrol and the militarized border apparatus are the exterior engine. To eliminate ICE, movements must dismantle the conditions that fuel it.

Border demilitarization does not mean “no border.” It means replacing a system built on deterrence, death, surveillance, and militarized control with one built on safety, legal pathways, and humanitarian infrastructure. To do this, movements must understand the border not as a line but as a multilayered enforcement ecosystem -- a network of surveillance towers, Forward Operating Bases, roving checkpoints, drone grids, contracted mercenary units, military partnerships, and binational policies shaped by U.S. economic domination of Mexico.

Stage 5 teaches how to dismantle that system structurally, politically, and practically.

Understand What “The Border” Actually Is (and Why It Must Be Dismantled)

The border is not a geographic line running through the desert. It is a militarized zone extending up to 100 miles inland, where constitutional rights are weakened and Border Patrol operates with extraordinary discretion.

Militarization consists of:

• 400+ surveillance towers operated with military-grade sensors

• Ultralight radar systems and helicopter patrols

• DHS partnerships with the Department of Defense that transfer weapons, drones, and artillery-grade surveillance equipment

• 4,000+ agents stationed in Forward Operating Bases

• Checkpoints positioned deep inside the U.S. interior

• Prevention Through Deterrence policies designed to force migrants into lethal terrain

• Binational policing agreements that allow U.S. intelligence to guide Mexican military units

• Private contractors who profit from electronic monitoring, tower maintenance, and desert surveillance

This system was built to do one thing: make migration deadly so that “illegal entry” becomes a tool of political control. ICE is the interior enforcement branch of this same deterrence logic.

Abolition requires dismantling the border’s military machinery so that “illegal entry” ceases to be produced at all.

This can be achieved through 4 phases:

Phase 1: Remove Militarized Structures and Enforcement Architecture

Demilitarization begins with dismantling the physical and technological infrastructure that turns the border into a battlefield.

1. Dismantle Surveillance Towers and Sensor Networks

These towers feed real-time movement data to Border Patrol and the military. Removing them requires:

• Coordinated campaigns targeting tower contracts with private companies (Elbit Systems, Raytheon, General Dynamics)
• Public records requests to expose cost overruns, failure rates, and internal audits
• Lawsuits challenging improper environmental waivers used to build the towers
• Pressure campaigns on county boards that host tower sites
• State legislation banning new towers or requiring local approval for surveillance infrastructure

The goal is to break the surveillance net that drives death by forcing people into more remote routes.

2. Remove Interior Checkpoints

Border Patrol checkpoints located 30, 50, or even 80 miles from the border function as interior dragnet operations that feed ICE data systems.

To dismantle them:

• Collect testimonies of racial profiling, seizure of property, coercive searches, and rights violations
• Pressure county sheriffs who collaborate with checkpoint operations
• Partner with civil rights groups to file Fourth Amendment lawsuits
• Build coalitions of border residents and tribal nations who oppose checkpoint presence
• Map agricultural and tourism losses caused by checkpoint delays and publicize the harm to local economies

When checkpoints lose local legitimacy, Congress and DHS can be forced to shutter them.

3. End DOD Equipment Transfers

Much of Border Patrol’s arsenal comes through Pentagon programs like 1033. Cut the supply line by:

• Pressuring state-level National Guard units to withdraw from border deployments
• Passing state bills banning law enforcement agencies from receiving DOD equipment
• Publishing investigative reports linking DHS weaponry to military contracts
• Lobbying the relevant congressional committees (Armed Services, Homeland Security) to restrict transfers
• Mobilizing veterans’ groups to condemn the militarization of migration

4. Disband Border Patrol Tactical Units

Units like BORTAC and BORSTAR operate like paramilitary teams. 

To dismantle them:

• Document abuses committed in raids, desert chases, and river confrontations
• File civil rights complaints and wrongful death lawsuits
• Pressure DHS to disband tactical units by highlighting their lack of legal oversight
• Mobilize border communities to testify about abuse patterns
• Use congressional hearings to expose violent operations

Phase 2: Replace Deterrence With Humanitarian Reception Infrastructure

You cannot simply remove border militarization; you must replace it with systems that make migration safe, orderly, and humane.

1. Create Humanitarian Reception Centers

Reception centers should be staffed by:

• trauma-informed clinicians
• immigration legal navigators
• social workers
• multilingual case managers
• child psychologists
• family reunification specialists

They must operate independently of CBP, ideally under civilian agencies or NGOs.

2. Provide Legal Orientation at the Point of Entry

Most migrants do not understand asylum law or their rights. Provide:

• on-site legal briefings
• multilingual rights education
• screening for trafficking, domestic violence, and medical emergencies
• early identification of asylum eligibility

This prevents misinformation, panic, and unnecessary secondary crossings.

3. Build Safe Transit Pathways Into the Interior

Instead of funneling migrants into detention or chaotic bus dumps, humanitarian corridors must be created:

• Federally funded transportation to interior cities
• Partnerships with sanctuary cities for temporary housing
• Formal coordination with hospitals, schools, and faith communities

4. Guarantee Family Unity

Under deterrence logic, families are separated to punish migration. Under a humanitarian model, family unity is a legal guarantee.

Phase 3: Build Binational Justice Frameworks That Address the Causes of Migration

The border crisis is a U.S.-made crisis. Any real solution must address the economic and political conditions that drive migration.

1. Create Cross-Border Worker Protections

Binational agreements must guarantee:

• Equal labor rights for Mexican and Central American workers
• Cross-border enforcement of wage theft claims
• Portability of labor protections for seasonal and migrant workers
• Penalties for U.S. employers who exploit undocumented labor

2. Address Economic Harm Created by NAFTA and U.S. Agribusiness

Millions were displaced when subsidized U.S. crops flooded Mexico. Solutions require:

• Compensatory economic support for Mexican agricultural sectors
• Expansion of farmworker cooperatives
• Support for indigenous land rights movements
• Renegotiations of trade rules that destroyed rural livelihoods

3. Create Humanitarian Labor Visas

Migration should be safe and legal. This requires:

• Low-barrier labor visas
• Family accompanying rights
• Non-employer-tied visas to prevent exploitation
• Clear pathways to residency

4. Coordinate Rights-Based Asylum Systems

The U.S. must cooperate with Mexico and Central American governments to:

• Establish regional processing centers that are non-punitive
• Integrate climate-displacement protections
• Ensure due process and appeal rights

Phase 4: End Prevention Through Deterrence and Rebuild Safe Migration Routes

Prevention Through Deterrence is the official U.S. border-enforcement strategy, adopted in the 1990s, that intentionally pushes migrants into deadly desert terrain by sealing off safer crossing points. The policy relies on heat, exhaustion, dehydration, and the wilderness itself as a weapon. It is responsible for thousands of state-manufactured deaths.

Abolition requires:

• Formally repudiating the policy at the federal level
• Investigating migrant deaths as forms of state-produced violence
• Rebuilding safe transit paths and clearly marked corridors
• Funding humanitarian aid groups rather than criminalizing them
• Creating memorial and truth processes for families of the disappeared
• Enforcing accountability across DHS for all deaths caused by deterrence tactics

This is where the border becomes a site of care instead of a weapon.

F. What Stage 5 Ultimately Accomplishes

By the end of this stage:

• The border is no longer a militarized zone
• Checkpoints and towers are dismantled
• DOD weapon flows are cut
• Tactical units lose legal cover and political support
• Safe migration routes replace death routes
• Humanitarian reception centers replace cages
• Binational economic justice eases the pressures that force migration
• Asylum processing becomes fair, not punitive
• Deterrence is abolished as a strategy

Without border militarization producing “illegal entry,” ICE loses its raw material.
The entire enforcement architecture collapses.

Abolition becomes structurally irreversible.

STAGE 6: BUILDING THE POST-ICE MIGRATION SYSTEM

Abolition is not simply the destruction of ICE. It is the construction of a new migration infrastructure that treats movement as a normal human phenomenon rather than a crime. Without a replacement system, power will simply flow back to punitive agencies. Stage 6 designs a structure that permanently removes migration governance from law enforcement and places it under civilian control, community oversight, and constitutional insulation so that no future administration can resurrect ICE under a new name.

A humane migration system does not rely on policing, detention, or punishment. It is a civilian public service that manages visas, asylum, labor mobility, and integration with transparency, accountability, and democratic participation. The shift is comparable to replacing a militarized crisis response with a public health model. Where ICE used coercion, the new system uses support. Where ICE created fear, the new system creates stability. Where ICE centralized power inside the Executive Branch, the new system distributes power to civilian professionals who are trained to help, not harm.

Stage 6 shows what that system looks like and how to build it in a country where the federal government cannot be trusted to govern migration humanely.

Create a Civilian Agency That Replaces ICE Entirely

1. Establish the Office of Migration Services (OMS)

The new civilian agency must be created as a chartered public institution that is:

Independent from the federal Executive Branch.

OMS cannot be located inside DHS or any Cabinet department. It cannot be directed, overridden, or absorbed by the U.S. President. Its structure must resemble independent public systems such as the Federal Reserve, the USPS constitutional model, or tribal sovereign institutions -- bodies that operate alongside the government rather than inside it.

Governed by community oversight rather than federal enforcement.

OMS leadership is selected through a combination of:

• Aappointments by state and municipal governments
• Elections by community constituencies
• Rotating representation from labor unions, immigrant organizations, and civil-society groups

No federal law-enforcement agency may hold a governing seat.

Unable to be militarized by statute.

The charter must prohibit OMS from:

• Owning weapons
• Operating detention centers
• Enforcing criminal or civil immigration law
• Partnering with DHS, ICE, CBP, or DOJ except in strictly defined humanitarian emergencies

Staffed by civilian professionals, such as:

• Social workers
• Humanitarian officers
• Trauma specialists
• Cultural liaisons
• Legal advocates
• Language-access coordinators

Responsible for all non-enforcement migration functions, including:

• Visa processing
• Asylum adjudication
• Humanitarian parole
• Family reunification
• Integration services
• Community resource coordination

Shielded from federal takeover.

The founding statute must include:

• A constitutional firewall preventing transfer of authority to enforcement agencies
• Multi-source funding (federal appropriations + state contributions + fee-based funding) that cannot be zeroed out by the White House
• Removal protections for OMS leadership similar to the Federal Reserve and FDIC
• A prohibition on federal law enforcement agents serving in OMS roles

OMS becomes a civilian public institution, not a federal executive agency.

It exists outside the federal enforcement system so that no future fascist administration can weaponize it.

2. How organizers win OMS creation

Building OMS requires a dual-track strategy that exploits fractures inside the federal system without placing OMS under presidential control.

Legislative Strategy

Movements draft a federal chartering statute, not a typical agency-creation bill. This statute:

• Transfers all non-enforcement migration functions out of DHS
• Establishes OMS as a civilian, insulated public institution
• Mandates trauma-informed practice and language-access standards
• Prohibits enforcement functions by law
• Bans cooperation with DHS, ICE, or CBP except during strictly defined humanitarian emergencies

Executive Strategy

Movements force concessions by:

• Pressuring the White House to relinquish administrative control over non-enforcement functions
• Demanding executive orders that cede authority to OMS
• Lobbying for interim appointees who support a service-based migration system
• Making OMS politically inevitable through mass mobilization, legal pressure, and bureaucratic breakdowns
• Building public campaigns showing that civilian processing is cheaper, faster, and more humane

The Executive Branch is not a partner. It is a pressure point.

B. Build a National Welcome System That Makes Migration Safe, Predictable, and Dignified

A humane migration system meets people where they arrive and provides the infrastructure necessary to support stable integration into local communities.

1. Create Welcome and Orientation Centers in Major Cities

These centers provide:

• Immediate Orientation in the person’s primary language
• Legal Information for asylum, work authorization, and family reunification
• Intake by trauma-trained social workers
• Medical Triage and mental health screening
• Rights Education for navigating schools, hospitals, courts, and housing

2. Build Locally Based, Federally Funded Legal-Service Networks

Universal representation requires:

• Funding through a protected federal appropriations line
• Creation of regional pooled-attorney models
• Expansion of accredited non-lawyer advocates
• Guarantees of free interpreters in all proceedings

3. Provide Workforce Integration and Labor Protections

Integration requires:

• Access to workforce development
• Enforcement of anti-exploitation protections
• Pathways to union membership
• Recognition of foreign credentials

4. Ensure Housing and Tenant Protections

Housing stability requires:

• Emergency Rental Assistance
• Tenant-Rights Advocates
• Local Ordinances banning discrimination
• Support for host-family programs

2. Build Federally Funded, Locally Based Legal-Service Networks

Legal access is the backbone of safety. To achieve universal representation:

• Fund legal services through a dedicated federal appropriations line
• Create regional pooled-attorney models to cover rural areas
• Expand accreditation programs for non-lawyer legal advocates
• Guarantee free interpreters across all immigration proceedings

Universal representation does not slow the system. It increases efficiency, reduces court burden, and prevents wrongful removals.

3. Provide Workforce Integration and Economic Stability Programs

Integration requires:

• Access to workforce development programs
• Enforcement of anti-exploitation protections
• Pathways to union membership
• Credential recognition programs for foreign-trained workers

Labor stability reduces vulnerability, eliminates exploitation, and prevents underground economies that ICE historically exploited to justify enforcement.

4. Ensure Housing and Tenant Protections for New Arrivals

Migrants often fall victim to predatory landlords. The system must include:

• Dedicating tenant-rights specialists within OMS
• Providing emergency rental assistance
• Advocating local ordinances banning discrimination based on migration status
• Offering support for host-family programs and short-term placement networks

This prevents exploitation and homelessness.

C. Create Federal Integration Funds That Empower Cities and Communities

A post-ICE system must strengthen the capacity of states and cities rather than impose unfunded mandates.

Integration funds operate through OMS, not DHS, and support:

• Bilingual Education through school-district grants
• Medical access through clinic and hospital grants
• Shelter support for community-based organizations
• City infrastructure for areas receiving large numbers of arrivals
• Technical assistance for local integration planning

Funds must be long-term, mandatory, and shielded from Executive manipulation.

D. Install Genuine Public Oversight Mechanisms to Prevent Re-Militarization

Any system can drift back into punitive logic unless oversight is structurally embedded.

Oversight requires:

• Community Oversight Boards with power to issue findings
• Whistleblower protections
• Annual Public Reports on outcomes and rights compliance
• Independent audits by non-DHS inspectors
• Regular Public Hearings with testimony from migrants and advocates

E. Build a Culture of Migration as Public Service, Not Enforcement

Abolition is cultural as much as structural. OMS must train a new generation of public servants who conceptualize migration not as deviance but as a normal human experience.

This training includes:

• Trauma-informed care
• Cultural humility
• Language justice
• Refugee and asylum law
• Ethics of confidentiality
• Historical education on U.S. foreign policy, colonization, and displacement
• Public service ethics drawn from social work rather than policing

A migration system grounded in care instead of punishment cannot be easily weaponized.

F. What Stage 6 Ultimately Accomplishes

By the end of Stage 6:

• Migration is governed by an independent civilian institution
• Legal pathways are clear, accessible, and non-punitive
• Families are supported with orientation, legal help, and housing
• Cities are funded rather than burdened
• Oversight is civilian, transparent, and community-controlled
• The border is demilitarized
• The interior is safe rather than a site of raids and detention
• Migration becomes a public service instead of a crime

By this point, ICE has no remaining function. Its logic collapses, its mandate dissolves, and its infrastructure becomes obsolete. In its place stands a humane migration system that treats movement as a public service rather than a crime.

STAGE 7: TRANS-NATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY -- ADDRESSING THE ROOT CAUSES OF MIGRATION

Abolition does not end at the U.S. border. The U.S. has spent decades producing the very displacement that ICE exists to police. Any abolitionist framework must confront the global systems that drive migration: trade agreements that destroyed local economies, militarized drug wars that armed cartels while terrorizing civilians, weapons pipelines that flow south with impunity, climate collapse that accelerates food insecurity, and political manipulation that destabilizes governments across the hemisphere.

Stage 7 argues that abolition requires structural repair. Without confronting the U.S. policies that generate displacement, the cycle of migration, criminalization, and enforcement simply repeats under a different name. Ending ICE is not enough. Ending detention is not enough. The United States must dismantle the global machinery that displaces, colonized, and thus forces people to move in the first place and must participate in rebuilding the conditions that allow people to stay home safely if they choose.

This stage outlines what true transnational justice looks like and how movements can pursue it.

A. End the U.S.-Backed Drug War and Its Militarized Violence

The U.S. drug war, exported to Mexico and Central America, has been one of the greatest engines of displacement in the hemisphere. Billions in U.S. funding have militarized police, empowered corrupt security forces, and fueled cartel violence. Any abolitionist project must shut down this violence by dismantling the transnational enforcement apparatus that sustains it.

1. Cut DEA and DOD Funding to Militarized Units

Movements can target:

• Foreign Military Financing (FMF) streams that equip Mexican military units

• DEA joint operations that work with abusive police forces

• DOD training programs that expand paramilitary tactics

• Export licenses for surveillance equipment used in raids and disappearances

Campaigns should expose how U.S. financing strengthens units implicated in torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings. The goal is to strip violent forces of U.S. support.

2. Halt U.S. Training Programs for Corrupt Security Forces

Training is political. It confers legitimacy. Abolitionists must:

• Research which Mexican and Central American units receive U.S. training
• Document their human rights abuses
• Mobilize human rights organizations to oppose training renewals
• Lobby the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to block funding
• Publish investigations showing how training expands repression

Training programs must shift from militarized tactics to community-based harm reduction and civilian-led public health approaches.

3. Redirect Funds to Harm Reduction and Community Healing

Instead of militarization, U.S. resources should fund:

• Community-run drug treatment programs
• Mental health services
• Violence interruption projects
• Harm reduction centers
• Rural health clinics
• School-based support networks

These programs reduce violence far more effectively than military force.

B. Reverse NAFTA-Era Economic Harm and Support Agricultural Sovereignty

Millions of Mexicans have migrated because U.S. trade policy destroyed rural livelihoods. NAFTA flooded Mexico with subsidized U.S. corn and wheat, collapsing small farms and concentrating wealth among agribusiness giants and other U.S.-run multinational corporations in Mexico. Abolition requires repairing this economic destruction.

1. Fund Agricultural Recovery Programs in Mexico

U.S. federal legislation should include:

• Grants to rebuild rural farming infrastructure
• Training programs for young farmers
• Seed banks that preserve indigenous crops
• Irrigation systems that prevent climate-driven crop failures
• Support for community-owned grain processing facilities

2. Protect Small Farmers From Corporate Domination

This requires:

• Renegotiating trade rules to protect domestic agriculture
• Banning U.S. agribusiness dumping of subsidized crops
• Supporting fair-trade agreements
• Preventing monopolistic land grabs
• Creating cross-border farmer cooperatives

Supporting agricultural sovereignty enables people to remain in their communities instead of being pushed northward by corporate policy.

3. Expand Cooperative Farming and Land Justice Initiatives

Movements can partner with Mexican labor unions, indigenous groups, and campesino organizations to promote:

• Democratic land management
• Worker-owned agricultural collectives
• Cross-border organizing to negotiate better prices
• Sustainable agroecology practices
• Programs that restore the viability of rural economies

Abolition without economic repair is not abolition. It is abandonment.

C. Stop the Flow of U.S. Weapons Into Mexico and Central America

The U.S. is the primary source of weapons used by cartels and criminal networks across Mexico. Thousands of assault rifles, machine guns, and high-caliber weapons are trafficked south each year. U.S.-sourced guns fuel massacres, extortion, and displacement. Ending this flow is essential to ending forced migration.

1. Ban Assault Weapon Exports to Mexico

Advocacy must target:

• The Commerce Department’s export licensing
• Loopholes that allow private dealers to ship weapons abroad
• Gun manufacturers who knowingly fuel trafficking
• Congressional committees that oversee arms export controls

Abolitionists should demand a federal ban on all commercial assault weapon exports to Mexico.

2. Track U.S.-Sourced Crime Guns

Campaigns must push for:

• Mandatory serial number tracing
• Public databases listing which dealers supply cartel weapons
• Criminal penalties for dealers who repeatedly appear in trafficking investigations
• Cooperation with Mexican prosecutors to identify trafficking networks

Transparency dismantles the political power of the gun lobby.

3. Prosecute Traffickers and Complicit Dealers

Movements must pressure the DOJ and ATF to:

• Prosecute U.S. gun stores that knowingly facilitate straw purchases
• Pursue charges against trafficking networks operating near the border
• Strip licenses from dealers tied to violence and corruption
• Publish annual reports on trafficking patterns

The weapons pipeline is not inevitable. It is a policy choice.

D. Build Climate Resilience in Central America to Prevent Climate-Driven Displacement

Climate collapse is accelerating displacement through drought, hurricanes, crop failure, and infrastructure breakdown. The U.S. must treat climate migration as a predictable, preventable crisis created by global inequality.

1. Expand Refugee Pathways for Climate-Displaced People

This includes:

• Creating a climate refugee category in U.S. asylum law
• Granting humanitarian parole to families fleeing climate disasters
• Expanding Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for climate-vulnerable regions
• Partnering with UNHCR to develop regional climate mobility frameworks

2. Fund Water Infrastructure and Climate Adaptation Projects

Movements should demand:

• U.S. investment in water purification and desalination plants
• Reforestation programs
• Flood prevention infrastructure
• Community-controlled irrigation systems
• Disaster preparedness training

These projects help stabilize communities facing intensifying climate stress.

3. Support Anti-Corruption and Democratic Movements

Climate aid only works when funds are not siphoned off by corrupt elites. Abolitionists must:

• Fund civil society organizations
• Support investigative journalism
• Protect whistleblowers
• Condition U.S. development funding on anti-corruption benchmarks (without militarization)

Democratic stability reduces forced migration.

4. Build Local Renewable-Energy Programs

Invest in:

• Solar microgrids
• Community-run power cooperatives
• Training for green-energy jobs
• Decentralized energy systems that withstand storms

Energy sovereignty is essential to climate resilience.

E. What Stage 7 Ultimately Accomplishes

By the end of Stage 7:

• The U.S.-exported drug war collapses
• Weapons pipelines that fuel cartel violence are severed
• NAFTA-era economic devastation begins to reverse
• Rural economies in Mexico and Central America regain stability
• Climate-driven displacement is reduced through infrastructure and resilience
• Corruption is challenged through civil society empowerment
• Forced migration decreases because root causes are addressed
• The hemisphere becomes more just, stable, and capable of sustaining life

Abolition at its highest level is not merely the removal of cruelty at home but the restoration of justice abroad. It recognizes that ICE is not an isolated agency but the domestic face of a global system of violence the United States helped build, sustained, and exported. True abolition therefore becomes not only the dismantling of an institution, but the transformation of an entire hemisphere.

CONCLUSION: THE MORAL UNRAVELING OF AN EMPIRE AND THE WORK OF REBIRTH

There comes a point when a nation must confront what it has set in motion beyond its own borders. The people arriving at the U.S. frontier from the Global South are not anomalies in the human story. They are the predictable outcomes of policies the U.S. shaped: wars it armed, economies it distorted, and climates it helped destabilize. Their movement is not a mystery. It is a signal, a consequence of decisions made in powerful rooms far from the landscapes now emptied by violence and need.

When we step back from the nearsighted view of daily politics and consider humanity from a broader scientific perspective, a deeper truth becomes unavoidable. We share one planet, one atmosphere, and one interconnected system of life. The forces we unleash through militarism, extraction, and environmental collapse do not remain confined to the borders drawn on our maps. They spread, accumulate, and return. Seen this way, migration is not an intrusion. It is feedback from a small and fragile world in which no nation’s actions are ever isolated.

Abolition demands that the U.S. accept this reality. It requires the maturity to understand that punishment cannot repair what violence has broken, and fear cannot produce stability on a planet where every life is tied to every other. ICE is not a structure that protects. It is the final link in a long chain of harms that began long before any migrant reached a desert crossing or a port of entry.

To dismantle ICE is not to embrace naivety. It is to acknowledge the scientific and moral fact that human beings share a common fate on this planet. The Global South families who reach the U.S. border are part of the same species, breathing the same air and depending on the same thin layer of atmosphere that sustains all of us. They are not strangers to fear. They are participants in the same planetary story, shaped by forces the U.S. helped create.

A nation becomes wiser when it looks directly at its consequences. It becomes safer when it chooses repair instead of domination. And it becomes more humane when it recognizes that on this pale and solitary world, drifting through a vast and indifferent cosmos, our greatest responsibility is to one another.

Abolition is the beginning of that responsibility. It is the choice to build a system grounded in justice and planetary understanding, not fear. It is the decision to create a future where the dignity of each community strengthens the survival of us all.

REFERENCES 

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U.S. Settler Colonialism, Manifest Destiny, and the Conquest of Mexico

• Whitman, Walt. “Annexation” and related pieces. The United States Democratic Review, 1846-1848.
• Polk, James K. “President Polk’s War Message to Congress.” May 11, 1846.
• United States Congress. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. 1848.
• O’Sullivan, John L. “Annexation.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1845.
• Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Hietala, Thomas. Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire. Cornell University Press, 2003.
• Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press, 2013.
• Grandin, Greg. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Metropolitan Books, 2019.
• Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.
• Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. Pearson, various editions.
• González, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Penguin, 2011.

Racial Construction of “the Mexican” in U.S. Law and Culture

• Molina, Natalia. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. University of California Press, 2014.
• Haney López, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York University Press, 2006.
• Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. University of Texas Press, 2001.
• Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 2001.

Border Creation, Land Theft, and Migration Engineering

• Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. University of California Press, 2010.
• Jimenez, Andrea. The Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk at the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. University of Arizona Press, 2019.
• De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press, 2015.
• St. John, Rachel. Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Bracero Program, Labor Control, and Exploitation

• Cohen, Deborah. Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Calavita, Kitty. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. Routledge, 1992.
• Gutiérrez, David G. “The Bracero Program.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford University Press.
• Mitchell, Don. They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California. University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Operation Wetback, Criminalization, and Post-Bracero Repression

• Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Hernández, Kelly Lytle. “Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Workers in the 1950s.” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006).
• García, Juan R. Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954. Greenwood Press, 1980.

NAFTA, Corporate Domination, and Economic Displacement

• Bacon, David. Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Beacon Press, 2008.
• Faux, Jeff. The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It Will Take to Win It Back. Wiley, 2006.
• Wise, Timothy A. “The Impacts of NAFTA on Mexican Agriculture.” Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University (multiple reports).
• Public Citizen. NAFTA at 20. 2014.
• Oxfam International. Mexican Agriculture After NAFTA. Various reports.

U.S. Militarization of Mexico, Cartel Violence, and Weapons Trafficking

• Grillo, Ioan. El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. Bloomsbury, 2011.
• Grillo, Ioan. Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. Bloomsbury, 2021.
• Shirk, David A., and David Wood. Elusive Justice: The Militarization of Public Security in Mexico. Trans-Border Institute reports.
• United States Government Accountability Office (GAO). Firearms Trafficking from the United States to Mexico.
• Dube, Oeindrila, et al. “Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico.” American Economic Review 110, no. 10 (2020).
• United States Department of Justice. Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious investigative reports.

U.S. Coups, Death Squads, and Imperial Violence Across Latin America

• Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Zed Books, 2003.
• Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
• Chomsky, Noam. Year 501: The Conquest Continues. South End Press, 1993.
• Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. The Political Economy of Human Rights. South End Press, 1979.
• Gill, Lesley. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2004.
• Loveman, Brian. No Higher Law: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere Since 1776. University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• United Nations. Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification: Guatemala, Memory of Silence. 1999.
• United Nations. From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador. Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, 1993.
• Amnesty International. Human Rights in the Americas: Documentation of State Violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Colombia. Amnesty International Publications, 1990s-2000s.

Creation of ICE, Clinton-Era Laws, the Post-9/11 Security State, and DHS

• United States Congress. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (and subsequent amendments).
• United States Congress. Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA).
• United States Congress. Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA).
• United States Congress. Homeland Security Act of 2002.
• Golash-Boza, Tanya. Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism. New York University Press, 2015.
• García Hernández, César Cuauhtémoc. Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants. The New Press, 2019.
• Hesson, Ted. “ICE: Inside America’s Immigration Enforcement.” Associated Press investigations.
• United States Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General. Reports on ICE detention conditions, various years.
• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Detention and Deportation archives.
• National Immigrant Justice Center. FOIA litigation reports on ICE and DHS.

Detention Conditions, Abuse, and Human Rights Violations

• Human Rights Watch. Code Red: The Fatal Consequences of Dangerously Substandard Medical Care in Immigration Detention.
• Physicians for Human Rights. Behind Closed Doors: Abuse and Retaliation Against Detainees in U.S. Immigration Detention.
• Detention Watch Network. Expose & Close reports.
• United States Office of Inspector General. Concerns about ICE Detainee Treatment and Care at Detention Facilities, multiple reports, 2017-2023.
• Freedom for Immigrants. Immigration Detention Accountability Project reports.

Legal Foundations of Deportation and Crimmigration

• United States Congress. Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA).
• United States Congress. Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA).
• Motomura, Hiroshi. Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Stumpf, Juliet. “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power.” American University Law Review 56 (2006): 367-419.
• Kanstroom, Daniel. Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Economics of Migrant Labor and Exploitation

• Massey, Douglas S., Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration. Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.
• Milkman, Ruth. Immigrant Workers and the Future of U.S. Labor. Cornell University Press, 2010.
• Sassen, Saskia. Guests and Aliens. The New Press, 1999.
• Borjas, George J. Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Baker, Dean. The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006.

Sanctuary Movements, Local Resistance, and Policy Strategies

• Villazor, Rose Cuison. “Sanctuary Cities and Local Immigration Policy.” Fordham Law Review 37 (2010).
• Ridgley, Jennifer. “Cities of Refuge: Immigration Enforcement, Police, and the Insurgent Genealogies of Citizenship in U.S. Sanctuary Cities.” Urban Geography 29, no. 1 (2008).
• Capps, Randy et al. The Integration of Immigrants into American Society. National Academies Press, 2015.
• Kwon, Hye Jin. Reports on organizing immigrant communities in the shadow of deportation (political sociology field studies).
• National Immigration Law Center (NILC). Reports on local ordinance strategies and sanctuary policies.

Abolitionist Theory and Movement Strategy

• Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition. Haymarket Books, 2022.
• Kaba, Mariame. We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Haymarket Books, 2021.
• Critical Resistance. “Abolitionist Organizing Toolkits,” various years.
• INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. South End Press, 2007.

Climate Change, Migration, and Displacement

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Assessment Reports, Working Group II.
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Global Trends: Forced Displacement (annual reports).
• Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). Global Report on Internal Displacement (annual).
• CARE International. People on the Move in a Changing Climate (reports).
• Biermann, Frank, and Ingrid Boas. “Protecting Climate Refugees: The Case for a Global Protocol.” Environment 50, no. 6 (2008).

Trans-national Harm, Responsibility, and Global Justice

• Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press, 2003.
• Achiume, E. Tendayi. “Migration as Decolonization.” Stanford Law Review 71 (2019): 1509-1574.
• Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.
• Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Pogge, Thomas. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Polity Press, 2002.

Delegitimizing ICE, Political Memory, and Movement Narrative

• Chomsky, Noam. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. Seven Stories Press, 1997.
• Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988.
• Haney López, Ian. Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America. The New Press, 2019.
• Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• McAlevey, Jane. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Ganz, Marshall. Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Congressional Power, Appropriations, and Administrative Constraint

• Schick, Allen. The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process. Brookings Institution Press, 2007.
• Kagan, Elena. “Presidential Administration.” Harvard Law Review 114 (2001): 2245-2385.
• Katyal, Neal Kumar. “Internal Separation of Powers.” Yale Law Journal 115 (2006): 2314-2419.
• American Immigration Council. Analyses of DHS and ICE appropriation trends and budget structures, various reports.

Secure Communities, 287(g), and the Police-ICE Pipeline

• Armenta, Amada. Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement. University of California Press, 2017.
• Ryo, Emily, and Ian Peacock. “The Landscape of Immigration Detainers in the United States.” Southern California Law Review 92 (2018).
• Capps, Randy et al. “Delegation and Divergence: A Study of 287(g) State and Local Immigration Enforcement.” Migration Policy Institute, 2011.
• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Reports on Secure Communities and immigration detainers.
• National Immigration Law Center (NILC). The 287(g) Program: A Flawed and Dangerous Policy.
• García Hernández, César Cuauhtémoc. Crimmigration Law. American Bar Association, 2015.

Deportability, Legalization, and Labor Power

• Motomura, Hiroshi. Immigration Outside the Law. Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Wadhia, Shoba Sivaprasad. Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases. New York University Press, 2015.
• Massey, Douglas S. et al. “The Social Process of International Migration.” Science 237, no. 4816 (1987): 733-738.
• Baker, Dean. Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2016.
• González, Juan, and Joseph Torres. News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Verso, 2011.

Alternatives to Detention and Case Management Systems

• International Detention Coalition. There Are Alternatives: A Handbook for Preventing Unnecessary Immigration Detention.
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Back to Basics: The Right to Liberty and Security of Person and Alternatives to Detention of Refugees, Asylum-Seekers, Stateless Persons and Other Migrants.
• Vera Institute of Justice. Testing Community Supervision for the INS: The Appearance Assistance Program.
• Women’s Refugee Commission. Community-Based Alternatives to Immigration Detention.
• American Bar Association. Reports on representation, appearance rates, and alternatives to detention in immigration proceedings.

Municipal Non-Cooperation and Local Power

• Varsanyi, Monica W. Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
• Ridgley, Jennifer. “Refuge, Refusal, and Acts of Holy Contagion: Sanctuary and the Sanctuary City.” Religion and American Culture 18, no. 2 (2008).
• Gutiérrez, David G., and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, eds. Nation and Migration: Past and Future. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
• De Graauw, Els. Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco. Cornell University Press, 2016.

Border Militarization and Demilitarization

• De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press, 2015.
• Hernández, Kelly Lytle. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
• Nevins, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on Illegals and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. Routledge, 2010.
• Dunn, Timothy J. The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home. University of Texas Press, 1996.
• United States Government Accountability Office (GAO). Reports on border security and surveillance infrastructure.

Climate and Trade Root Causes

• Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
• Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 2007.
• Wise, Timothy A. Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food. The New Press, 2019.
• Bacon, David. The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration. Beacon Press, 2013.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Special Report on Climate Change and Land.
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Thematic reports on climate change and displacement.

Civilian Migration Institutions and Post-ICE Governance

• Lipsky, Michael. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Russell Sage Foundation, 1980.
• Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Harvard University Press, 1992.
• O’Connell, Anne Joseph. Articles on administrative law and immigration agencies in leading law reviews.
• American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Proposals and reports on the creation of an Article I immigration court system.

Movement Strategy, Power-Building, and Organizational Infrastructure

• Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Vintage, 1979.
• Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Vintage, 1971.
• Tilly, Charles. Social Movements, 1768-2004. Paradigm Publishers, 2004.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé et al. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press, 1995.
• Kaba, Mariame, and Andrea J. Ritchie. No More Police: A Case for Abolition. The New Press, 2022.